


rockpools (asleep like a dreamer)

by Quoshara, speakmefair



Series: Reminders [3]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Future Fic, Multi, Origins, Series, Violence, alternating pov, canon character death, non-linear timeline, sentient pillows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-17
Updated: 2013-02-17
Packaged: 2017-11-29 13:50:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/687689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quoshara/pseuds/Quoshara, https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair/pseuds/speakmefair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Following Dom's return to the game, coffee heists are planned, Dom gains some surprising insights into his past, and nothing is ever as easy as it seems when it comes to dreamshare.</p>
            </blockquote>





	rockpools (asleep like a dreamer)

  
_The sea asleep like a dreamer sighs;_  
The salt rock-pools lie still in the sun,  
Except for the sidling crab that creeps  
Thro the moveless mosses green and dun.  
The small gray snail clings everywhere,  
For the tide is out; and the sea-weed dries  
Its tangled tresses in the warm air,  
That seems to ooze from the far blue skies,  
Where not a white gull on white wing flies. 

_O sweet is the world of living things,_  
And sweet are the mingled sea and shore!  
It seems as if I never again  
Shall find life ill--as oft before.  
As if my days should come as the clouds  
Come yonder--and vanish without wings;  
As if all sorrow that ever shrouds  
My soul and darkly about it clings  
Had lost forever its ravenings.  
\-- Cale Young Rice  


**Dom, now**

It wasn't that Dom wasn't happy that his whole idea of a party had eventually worked out (more or less). It wasn't that he wasn't pleased that whatever the fuck had been going on with Arthur and Eames was now sorted out to their satisfaction (and he really didn't want to speculate about it any more than that). It wasn't that he wasn't happy to be getting back in the game, even if it was for the stupidest extraction ever (because for fuck's sake, who cared about whether Saito wanted to rule the world with coffee or not, anyway?)

It was just that _no-one seemed to be leaving his house._

Which was fine, really. Arthur and Eames were at a hotel (considering their complaints about hotels in general, Dom found this a bit strange, but he wasn't going to say anything in case he got an explanation, and — no), Yusuf and Ariadne had made some kind of arrangements of their own (and again, he wasn't asking), but Saito seemed to have decided he didn't even need to _ask_ if there was room for him, so even if (and God, it was turning out to be a big if) everyone finally _went away_ , there was still going to be an unnerving Japanese mogul in his spare room.

And the overcrowded house and the incredibly loud planning process weren't even the most ridiculous thing about the whole operation.

The most ridiculous thing about the whole operation, Dom thought, was the idea that there was such a thing as 'the perfect cup of coffee'. Eames, of course, denied that idea with his whole being — it was marginally nasty, all of it, he claimed, and it was only worth drinking it like a tonic to get caffeine into your system. He was, however, eventually forced to concede that if you cared for the damn stuff it might be worthwhile to have it be _consistently_ horrid, at least. Rather like, as Arthur said not-very-helpfully, Yusuf getting the mix of Somnacin and anaesthetic perfect each time, no foul ups.

The idea that someone would pay for such a thing was almost as mind boggling, until Saito showed them the figures on the gross profit that Starbucks had racked up every single year since its creation. Those were things that were absolutely impossible to argue with.

"Also," Saito had pointed out to a still-grumbling Eames, "it is possible that Starbucks does to coffee what you claim every cafe in the world does to tea. From what I have heard said."

Saito wasn't always as good at manipulation as he thought he was, as was proved by Eames complaining incessantly that he couldn't have cared less what people felt about Starbucks, and that in fact he was just as happy knowing that somewhere out there was a place making people who drank coffee despair of ever getting something that tasted halfway decent — especially since this was a process _he_ had to go through every. Damn. Time. 

Dom sighed, and resigned himself to a night of whining. Oh for a team that didn't think bickering, snide remarks, and outright insults were the highest and best forms of communication.

"You do realize that this figure right here..." Eames pointed at a number indicating sales in France, "... is about sixty percent subsidized by Ariadne, herself?"

Ariadne made a disgruntled sound and slapped at Eames's shoulder, "I do not drink that much coffee!"

There was a suspicious silence.

"Actually," Yusuf said, sounding sort-of-apologetic-but-not-really, an art form that someone who caused quite so much destruction at the chemical level needed to have perfected, but was still rather lovely to watch in operation, "I think it may be possible that you _do._ "

"Traitor," Ariadne huffed and then laughed. "I suppose I can't deny it since you've met me there often enough."

Eames raised an eyebrow at his former flatmate. Yusuf's only reply was a bland smile.

"Come to Paris a lot, do you?" Eames asked Yusuf pointedly then, because that kind of evasion was the kind of thing that just begged to be poked at, when it was this lot. "Come to Paris and fail to see your best mate, that's not nice, Yusuf."

"I am not always a nice man," Yusuf agreed, as bland as his smile. "Besides, you were being plotted against. It is a little difficult to plot against someone you are out getting drunk with."

The fact that this little revelation caused Arthur to outright laugh was the only thing that saved Yusuf, since as Dom knew from long experience, Eames couldn't stay annoyed with that sound in the room. 

"If we're done with all this, can we get started?" Dom's voice — the _Dad Voice_ , as Eames now called it, much to Dom's irritation — called them all to order.

"Funny," Ariadne said, tongue tucked firmly in her cheek. "You're usually telling us not to start." Yusuf made a sort of 'zing' noise.

"I don't want to know what that meant, do I?" Dom asked wearily. "Can we... just..." he waved a sheaf of papers at them vaguely. Some of them slid out of the middle and cascaded towards the floor, and he stared after them in hopeless dismay. "That was in order."

"And maybe we could buy Dom a coffee shop of his very own," Ariadne said to no-one in particular.

"He'd like that," Philippa came in and with very little ceremony settled herself in Eames lap. " _Grand-mère_ says he needs to have it put in... intravin—interveen— You know, in his arm with a needle."

"Intravenously, sweetheart," Eames supplied the word. 

"Yes, that." She nodded and leaned forward to wave at Arthur.

Arthur returned the wave, but said nothing. Dom suspected it was so that he could keep this mouth closed over all the things he wanted to say about Marie, who despite being Pip and James's beloved grand-mère, was also one of the main reasons the police had been so convinced Dom would turn out to be the psychopathic wife-murderer that damned note of Mal's had more than hinted at. Dom, too entrenched in his ideas of what family should mean to do anything about Marie — or, unfortunately, her opinion of him — just in case the children felt her lack, always did his best to never even hint at a sense of unfairness.

Arthur did. It was entirely possible that he disliked her more than he hated being lied to.

"Philippa," Dom's voice caught her attention, and she made a great show of investigating the tea in Eames's cup, in a futile attempt (as far as Dom was concerned) of avoiding whatever was coming next, "have you done all your chores?

"Uh-huh," she nodded, sniffing at the steam. "Bed made, toys put away, hair brushed." She turned her head to show him the back. "And, _and_ , I helped James brush his teeth."

Eames's lips twitched. "Yeah, I've seen what happened when Pip 'helps' James with anything," he said over her head to Dom, "and now I'm wondering what level of toxicity your bathroom's at."

"Oh God," Dom said weakly, wondering something horribly similar, and then, "yeah, thanks, that was helpful." He even managed to sound as though he semi-meant it. "But maybe you'd like to go and make sure he hasn't decided to do it again on his own?"

Philippa looked like she was going to protest, but at her father's headshake she just sighed, hugged Eames and then skipped back out the door.

"Okay, I'm going to try this again," Dom's voice, much though he tried to tone down his irritation, rang with a tone that said quite clearly that right at that moment he didn't know who required more guidance, his children or his team. "Arthur?"

Arthur stood and handed out files to each of them, "The Brassez Mieux Café has been serving coffee to natives and tourists alike for the past twenty years."

Dom tuned him out. Mostly because he didn't need a promotion brochure equivalent, and more than a little bit because he didn't care what they did with their coffee on the everyday level. They could be snorting it like cocaine as far as he was concerned, never mind selling it with equal opportunities to Parisians and tourists. And come to think of it, they were a cafe, wasn't that what they were supposed to do?

Still, rather like God, Arthur's research worked in mysterious ways it was better not to question. Or, quite often, listen to.

"—Apparently, they are doing something to make it this consistent and it's caused their profits to almost triple in the last four years," Arthur finished up a few moments later.

"And that is what we need to discover," Saito stated the obvious. "The key must be more than simply good luck, but no one has yet determined what it is."

"Not using boiling water?" Yusuf suggested dully. For someone who loved to play with anything experimental and actually liked coffee, he was remarkably unenthusiastic about speculating what was being done to produce this purportedly magic brew.

"That's just in cafeterias, isn't it?" And yet again, they were all off on tangents, Arthur standing there and irritated beyond belief at the fact all his work had been ignored in favour of the nonsensical debate, Saito and Ariadne discussing etymology, Eames wistfully listing the terrible, terrible things he could do to Yusuf's annoying mind once they were in the dreamscape, Yusuf listing all the very special concoctions he could create just for Eames, and Dom trying very hard not to just yell at the world to shut up.

"The point is," Dom interrupted them at last, "for us to find out... not simply to sit here and make guesses."

"The point is," Arthur corrected, "that we can't do any of this long distance. We'll need to go back to France — or, well, _to_ France, for some of us, as soon as possible."

"Yay..." Eames sounded distinctly underwhelmed. Dom guessed that he'd much rather be spending the next several weeks just being with Arthur... an Arthur whose attention he had to himself, rather than sharing it with some stupid French coffee op.

"Oh, you're back with us, are you?" Arthur asked snippily, but Eames didn't take offence as he would have a year ago, because thanks to some long-overdue conversations, he'd worked something out about why Arthur used him as a target, and it wasn't that he didn't snap back, since if Arthur had wanted nothing more than a cushioning wall, he would have turned his irritation on Yusuf.

It was the fact that out of all of them, Eames was the least likely to bear a grudge. He reacted, he tried to smack Arthur back down, and he moved on.

Dom, on the other hand, knew himself well enough to admit that he would quote the conversation verbatim five years later, because his taking offence was of the slow-burning, lasting kind. Ariadne was still young enough to be hurt, and Yusuf tended to take revenge one week later and in a way that led to the equivalent of waking up missing eyebrows.

"So sorry, darling," Eames smirked. "Was there really something in there that I needed to hear?"

"Was there—?" Arthur drew himself up as if he was going to begin one of his monumental rants on responsibility to the team and how details could make or break an op. But suddenly, he stopped, looked at Eames and just grinned sheepishly, "No, I suppose not. We'll have to actually be where you can observe before there's anything for you to do. This place is so small that other than financials and few newspaper articles I can't find out much about the owner or his friends and family."

"Oh my God... who are you and what have you done with Arthur?" Ariadne looked at him, her eyes wide.

"If either of you answer that question," Dom started, and then just shook his head. "No, forget it. No-one answer that question, think about that question, or —"

Too late. Ariadne went a strange shade of bright pink, Yusuf grinned, and Saito closed his eyes in a brief but very obvious moment of playing the mental game 'anywhere but here'.

Eames put on his best look of innocence. "Dom, you wound me! Would I?"

"Yes," Dom said miserably. "Yes, yes you would."

"Right then, since there's nothing for me to do at the moment... and Arthur says he needs to be in — _God, France again already?_ — Fuck. There's no escape, is there? Anyway, we'll just be off so that our filthy minds do not corrupt your innocence..."

"My mind's not filthy," Arthur protested.

"Liar..."

"Please," Dom said, "just go. Now."

"To France?" Eames couldn't resist it. He could never resist it.

Dom glared at him. "Out," he said.

"And proud," Yusuf said to the table, straight-faced, and then ruined it by folding up in silent laughter.

**

It was so different now, Dom thought later on that evening, after the children (the adult ones as well as those whose actual age lent them that description) had been put to bed. As much as he had loved Mal and planned with her and dreamed with her (the hopeful kind, not the kind that required a needle stuck in your arm) he never would have pictured their life together in quite this way. Oh, they had friends, Arthur and Eames had been a constant for a long time, but the two of them were still mostly self-contained, with the others just circling around their binary orbit, coming into contact at will and then drifting away as the two of them focused, once again, on themselves. It was rather selfish at times, Dom had always thought, and yet, Mal was Mal and everything to him, with all her fussiness and faults he wouldn't have changed anything about her — she was as imperfectly perfect as anyone could ever be.

"Shall I turn off this light, Mr. Cobb?" Saito's figure was outlined in the doorway of the kitchen.

"Dom... Really, call me Dom." It was an ongoing argument between them, friendly and amusing. "I thought you'd already gone."

"Not as yet," Saito answered him back, "as you see. But I am now. Do you wish this light off or on?"

"Oh... uh, on. I have to run the dishwasher and clean off the stove before I turn in."

Saito nodded, then picked up his briefcase and walked towards the hallway, apparently heading for his room.

"'Night," Dom said absently, giving a languid wave of his hand.

"Goodnight, Mr. Cobb." Saito smirked at him, closing the living-room door behind him.

"Dom," he insisted quietly, leaning back into the softness of the couch. He'd get up in a few moments, straighten up the kitchen and then go to bed.

It was odd, the house being so quiet. It was almost like the days back before he and Mal had gotten married. He had lived in a tiny apartment — well, not tiny so much as full of research materials and books — near the University. It was stuffy and a bit shabby, but very comfortable. He had been quite happy with it... until he met Mal. Then it had just become that place where you were embarrassed to bring your girlfriend.

Dom laughed to himself, remembering, and looked at the warm but spacious place his current home had become. Story books and Lego covering the coffee table, a notepad full of sketches, some by Eames and some by Philippa (and some by both, which included an extremely odd drawing of what he had been assured were salamanders on the moon), one lone sock probably belonging to James sticking out from the edge of the credenza — it all made him smile.

It was all so different to the first time the house had been inhabited — the clutter then had been all his work documents and Mal's lab paraphernalia and the oddest assortment of kit-bags Dom had ever imagined, and everyone's haphazard attempts at keeping their own things in order according to their personal needs, which had meant no-one ever remembered what had been tidied to where.

Dom had been planning to steal the PASIV and put it to proper use, Mal had been fully immersed in her project of saving Arthur from the fallout of her own collaboration with the government, and somehow it had all felt rather more like a military base from an alternate dimension than anything even tangentially related to reality.

Somehow, they had managed to get it all together, get each other straightened out (mostly) and move on. They had Mal to thank for so much of that. She'd been sweet and kind and fiercely brilliant in equal measure, helping both Arthur (and later Eames, after Dom brought him back from the base in the company of the PASIV) and himself, so very much himself, to become what they were today. 

Mal, who was wonderful at fixing people... everyone but herself.

And equally good at destroying them, hard as she tried not to.

Mal the chemist, Mal the genius of molecular bonding, who had forgotten, too often, that catalysts in life were sometimes less desirable than in her flasks and test-tubes.

**

**Arthur, then**

Being off-base, on leave, usually meant time spent with other soldiers, either cruising the bars or just hanging out and bullshitting about things you'd done (or hadn't done but bragged about anyway), and, in Arthur's case, attempt to fit in. But that was before Arthur had been recruited into the Dreamshare program. Now, none of that seemed important, the 'fitting in' least of all, and what _had_ become important were all things he couldn't discuss with what few people he had managed to connect with before he joined the program.

So in order to stop himself from inadvertently (or deliberately and uncaringly) giving away tiny details that would end up counting as treasonous indiscretions, his leave time was now, most often, spent with Mallorie Miles, the chemist whom the Dreamshare program were employing — or possibly the chemist who was employing _them_ , Arthur really wasn't very sure on that score, since she managed to ignore all supposed orders with ease and got away with outright refusal on a regular basis. 

Her company, which was infinitely more pleasurable in private, and her apartment, which was actually furnished to her own taste, provided a haven all their own, somewhere he could still talk, have a few drinks and actually relax, rather than pretend to. It was almost a refuge for him, more so than even the soothingly rulebound Academy had been.

At the Academy, Arthur had competed against other soldiers to win — whereas here, he merely competed against himself, a distinction that had made a one hundred percent change in how he viewed things. It was simultaneously wondrous, amazing, freeing and utterly fucking terrifying.

It was also about a thousand times harder than he had ever even dared to imagine in a three a.m. worry-fest, because apparently he was his own harshest critic and probably his own worst enemy when it came right down to it, at least in terms of just appreciating the chance he had been given and moving with whatever was expected of him.

The problem was, nothing _was_ expected of him. Other than total, unquestioning obedience, obviously, which shouldn't have been so hard, and mostly wasn't. 

The obedience part certainly wasn't, hadn't been for a long time, but the unquestioning part... that was definitely beginning to fail him, surrounded as he was by people who not only did nothing else, but were _employed_ to do nothing else. It was a strange temptation and a horrendous irritation, all at once, and some days he wasn't sure which was going to win out — and whether he would be able to keep his mouth shut, whichever side of him was victorious.

"Arthur, mon chéri, you worry too too much," Mal would say often, Mal who seemed to have appointed herself his friend as well as his co-worker and occasional refuge from insanity, whether he wanted that friendship or not.

He knew he did, honestly, but knowing it and knowing how all of this... this _independent thinking_ was affecting how he looked, not only at life in general, but at the life he had specifically chosen for himself — how could he not worry? He had woken up, more than once lately, from natural dreams that had him running, going AWOL, winding up dead due to poor choices and once, in actions that had him questioning his waking sanity, going postal and killing everyone on the base.

Because after all, killing didn't really take, these days, did it? 

He'd killed himself, he'd killed people he didn't know who'd then passed him in the hallway, he'd killed what he now knew to be projections — all he did, it seemed, however his sleep was induced, was to kill.

And he wasn't entirely sure what he was meant to use it for, other than blurring the lines of belief in permanency even further.

"Do you fear losing yourself? Or losing reality?" Mal asked him one night after he had dozed off on her couch and then came to with a start, sweating and gasping.

"Both," had been his answer. So simple to say, but so difficult to explain.

"It is impossible to lose oneself," Mal said. "Take comfort in that. Reality — ah, that is another game. Our dreaming _is_ our reality at the moment, how can we tell the dancer from the dance?" Her gaze softened. "And of course, you cannot build well, which makes it all much harder for you."

"The dreams are so real sometimes..." Arthur began. "More real than natural ones at any rate, and somehow, when I'm in the dream, it seems so difficult to try to think, 'Do I know how I got here? Do I remember the car trip, the walk, the airplane?' There must be a better way."

"There should be," Mal agreed. "If there were something that does not change in reality, or _only_ changes in reality, something one could rely upon — that would of course work. But —" She shrugged. "I have not yet thought of something the mind could not warp to its own ends."

"Something... something that's your own." Arthur tried to continue the thought. "Something that in reality always reacts a certain way, but that in the dreamshare... I dunno, could things be made to react differently? Like a control?"

It was a difficult concept and a difficult set of parameters to consider, but in the end it would be worthwhile for all of them and for anyone that would join the project later.

"Hmmm," was all he got from Mal, and then, "Yes, perhaps. Go back to sleep, Arthur. I think it is time I speak to my father. He has a student —" and suddenly, unexpectedly, she blushed, not from embarrassment, but as if shocked by heat, even her pale arms seeming to have been dipped in scalding water and withdrawn just one second's fraction too late. "He might have ideas," she finished, and the colour remained in her face, on her neck, the tops of her breasts where her open shirt exposed them. 

Mal, cool, reassuringly impervious Mal, suddenly heated from her bones outward by just the thought of a name.

"A student?" Arthur was bemused. Mal's reaction to thoughts of this 'student' were quite atypical for her. Mal was always a sea of calm in the tempest of life, for someone to affect her at all... well, it made Arthur think that this person, whoever he might be, was definitely someone special.

"Post-doc," Mal said absently, but her mind was obviously already far away from anything Arthur might have wanted to know, away in Paris with her father, who would need manipulating, and this student, this _post-doctoral_ student, who could make Mal turn from a calculating, remote goddess of the mind to a woman made startlingly and entirely of the flesh.

Arthur decided he was going to _hate_ this man. On principle.

He had never been what anyone's imagination would call a 'people person'. That he and Mal seemed to get along so well, work together so intuitively had actually amazed him. He had to give the credit to her, of course, but a part of him also said that maybe, just maybe, he had something to do with it as well. 

But now, there was this post-doc (Arthur huffed at the abbreviation) who seemed, even from a distance to fit with Mal in a way he would, he thought, never fit with anyone. Yes, his hatred would come easily, he thought.

And then, of course, Dominic Cobb arrived at the base, scatter-brained and scathing about the military and utterly brilliant all in equal measure, and he proved to be utterly, completely impossible to even _mildly dislike_ — not least because it was instantly clear that if Mal, for some unfathomable reason, considered him to be everything that made up desirability, Dom thought Mal had not only hung the moon but created it just to give her light to work by when she couldn't sleep. It was horribly endearing.

For awhile, Arthur felt like an incredibly lopsided third wheel, not sure where he fit in this newborn symphony of love. 

The fall-out from their slightest glance was almost scalding in its intensity, and made Arthur rather raw and snippish, but the more he was around Dom, the more they seemed to click. If working with Mal was intuitive, working with Dom was a duet, long practiced and melodious. Arthur was, frankly, amazed.

The thing was that if Mal was intuitive about people and chemicals and catalysts, and never hesitated in using her intuition to pull or push those around her to the point she needed them at, Dom simply operated out of a belief that all right-minded people thought as he did. If he had suffered through a bitch of a day where he'd bitten his lips raw trying not to insult people, he assumed that Arthur must feel the same way. If something had gone suddenly and wonderfully right, he thought everyone around him would be equally delighted and must want to celebrate.

He was less a man than an incomprehensible force of nature, in dreamshare and outside it — and he and Mal, together, were more than brilliant, they were more than just a good team, they were better even than stunning.

They were utterly incandescent.

And if Arthur often felt like the moth that circled their flame, well, he was a damn proud moth, happy to burn in the warmth and affection they shared with him.

**

**Eames, then**

Eames was pretty impressed with himself at the moment. His cover story was going over like a best seller and his forged paperwork hadn't gotten more than a cursory glance from the Sergeant at the gate, just enough to read the access and check the signature. It was disappointingly easy for him to get onto the base — and he was almost saddened by just how much the uniform helped. Of course, getting back out with what he wanted might just be a bit harder.

"Of course, you understand that while we can allow you to examine the equipment, bringing members of your own military here to use our copy of the device is not in question," said the very, very junior officer they had foolishly assumed was all Eames merited to take him on his 'tour'.

"Mm," Eames managed noncommittally, not in the mood to say what he was thinking, which was firstly that he suspected it wasn't going to be allowed anywhere _near_ the British military for quite some time, and secondly that the several copies (inferior though they undoubtedly were, if the forerunners of what was now being used, the terrible, clunky, utterly unreliable pre-prototypes he'd experienced were anything to go by) which they undoubtedly possessed in merry old England were locked away somewhere even he wouldn't be trying to remove it from.

There weren't many people Eames was afraid of, and there were even fewer that he respected, but the more ruthless branches of Britain's intelligence service were definitely up there. The U.S. military might be a bit prone to shooting first and asking questions later, but they then had a nasty tendency to get all honest about it afterwards, from what Eames had seen in the past. Piss off MI6, on the other hand, and you might as well never have existed. His choice of mark hadn't really been in question.

"If you'll just follow the road to your left, you'll see parking for building 27. Go through the main doors and the third office on the left is Captain Donovan's. I'll call and let his adjutant know you're on the way." The sergeant handed his papers back. "Be sure not to turn off this road, though, because you will be stopped. Welcome to Area 51, sir."

And with that, the gate was opened for him to drive through.

_I'm in Area 51_ , Eames thought with a fair degree of craziness that couldn't be entirely blamed on the heat or the bone-settled sleep-deprivation that was so much a part of him now he wasn't even sure it affected his thought patterns. _I'm in fucking Area 51 and they just told me to have a nice day. While I **steal** from them, oh, I'll be sure and have a lovely time, yeah, thanks for that... _

He managed to make sure not to turn off the road, though. It didn't seem worth getting stopped while he was cruising at this particular altitude of insanity.

Eames's meeting with Captain "All-American down to the Stars and Stripes on my boxer shorts" Donovan didn't go quite as well. His papers were accepted, with reluctance and mumbling about allowing foreigners to gallivant (the man actually used the word gallivant, for Christ's sake, who even thought that word in the backside of their head, let alone used it?) into restricted areas to 'sightsee'. 

Jesus fucking God, well so much for the 'special relationship', unless 'special' meant something more like 'special-ed', or the 'special bus'.

All in all, what it boiled down to was that he wasn't pleased with the idea and he was even less pleased or impressed with Eames's credentials — not because he suspected forgery, but simply because they came from outside the United States — prejudicial bastard.

On top of everything else, he pretended not to be able to understand Eames's accent.

Eames kept his temper, and upped his level of enunciation to cut-glass and consonants so hard and clipped and perfect that they might as well have been from a choral foundation. This particular accent had, in fact, been borrowed from a bloke he'd met, who'd been not only at Winchester, but gone on as one of the choral scholars at St. John's, Cambridge. 

Eames had actually met him because as well as having a God-given voice that could make angels consider falling for the chance to listen to him, said choral scholar also had a lovely little weakness for selling top-class cocaine — the bloke was beautifully easy to manipulate, and unfortunately, thanks perhaps to a little too much sampling of his own wares, boring as fuck between the sheets, but then Eames had always been good at taking the best out of an experience. 

He remembered, in the midst of his real-life forgery, to smile with his mouth closed so as not to get the usual disparaging look at his crooked teeth, another concealment of who they could think he must be. 

What _was_ it with the fucking Yanks and their robot teeth anyway?

Eventually, he was led away by the adjutant, one Lieutenant Garcia, who walked him down the broad tarmac road to a large warehouse type of building, dingy and grey on the outside — and not much better on the inside. 

It wasn't exactly what he had expected, even with the idea of Spartan military accommodations firmly in mind. How could one dream here? How could anyone dream up wonders and nuance and beauty with nothing around them in the waking world that could feed their imaginations? 

But then, perhaps that was the idea, they'd _have_ to create things from their own imaginations, living in a place like this, rather than pulling from real life.

The PASIV was ugly and squat and shaded just slightly towards the ludicrity of bad steampunk design. It was the most beautiful thing Eames had ever seen, because very shortly it was going to be his; his to bargain with, his to own, his to possess.

His to make him rich.

"Hello, gorgeous," he murmured to its hollows and already-stocked liquids. He touched one finger to it, as he might to the back of someone's hand — _yes, yes, hello, you are desirable, and I am here_ — "What secrets are you keeping for me, then?"

"Fascinating, isn't it?" The voice sounded far too close to him and had him jerking his hand away. "You must have used one before."

Eames turned to see earnest blue-grey eyes set in a serious face... well, attempting to be serious, but those same blue-grey eyes gleamed just enough to belie the tone of their owner's voice, a hint of secrets waiting to be shared, a quiet shining appreciation of the madness this place was constructed from that made Eames have to stifle a returning grin of his own.

"Mr. Evans," Lt. Garcia introduced them, carefully remembering the British form of address in a way that would have almost been touching if it hadn't been such an obvious hardship, "this is Dominic Cobb, our consultant on the Dreamshare Project."

Cobb held out his hand, his eyes studying Eames's face. _Reading it_ , Eames would have said. _And good luck with that_. "Have you?"

"Once or twice," Eames said blandly, shaking hands briefly and managing not to turn it into anything that might be mistaken for some kind of pissing contest. The man looked nice enough, and if he was a consultant, it probably wasn't entirely his fault he was involved with this mindfuck of a game. 

The poor bugger probably didn't even know what this lot were up to in the field, probably just theorised his way around stuff and would pass out cold if he knew anyone ever implemented his ideas with live human beings.

Once or twice. Yeah. As a euphemism for 'once or twice with really shit experimental chemists who thought forty-eight hours under was a great plan, and has me wanting to total your entire precious dreamsharing world', he thought it did quite nicely.

"Great, then you won't mind doing it again," Cobb said happily, and was hooking them both up before either Eames or a rather gobsmacked-looking Garcia (Christ, it was worth it just to have the man's efficiency turned into goldfish mouthings) could protest.

"Wait... what?" was all the protest that Eames had time for. Cobb activated the PASIV and they were under.

It was a rather amazing landscape that he found himself in, one that reminded him of some of the coast along Cornwall (one of the very few English coastal areas he'd been to, but he was choosing to think he was just good at recognising familiarity rather than severely limited in what he could to connect to back in reality), waves crashing against the rocks, places with rockpools that the waves refreshed , each of them with their own miniature ecosystem of plants and animals... and oddly enough, no one there except for himself and Dominic Cobb.

"This is... er, nice?" Eames said cautiously. There weren't even any other footprints on the sand, usually a sign that this was somewhere the dreamer used regularly.

"And you're very self-congratulatory," Cobb said with a faint smirk. Eames laughed.

"Man, it's not my dream, though," he said, letting a little London creep into his voice, because he was not some nicely educated, cloistered young officer with a chip on his shoulder about the established way of doing things and an inability to look outside the box, he was _himself_ , and he wasn't going to let some military sell-out consultant think he had rocks in his head. "You forgot the anemones."

"The what now?"

"In the rockpools, yeah? I always liked them, better when the tentacles weren't out though. Thought they looked like jewels." He grinned at Cobb, willing to unsettle him with too much personal information that wasn't information at all, just to see what this was really about; making himself look trustworthy so that Cobb would unwisely trust.

"Oh, those," Cobb's nose wrinkled. "Kinda creepy looking, don't you think? So wriggly and writhy."

Eames just shrugged. This was Cobb's game, especially since he'd been the one to drag Eames in... he'd just wait him out until he got ready to talk.

"Still... if you noticed they were missing, I'll have to rethink that." Cobb moved to the closest pool and stared down into it. "It's always the details that work against you."

"Um, yeah?" Eames very carefully didn't make any jokes about devils, details, or Cobb being obviously unsuited for either.

"You're here to steal the PASIV," Cobb said, still staring into the pool, and Eames blinked, unsure of what he'd heard.

"Sorry, what —"

"And I can't let you."

"Yeah, I think you'll find you can't _stop_ me, no-one's going to believe you if you come out of a dream and —"

"Oh, they'd believe _me_ ," Cobb said with an odd emphasis. "I've stolen secrets before. But no, that's not what I meant. I mean you can't steal it because I'm going to. And I think you'll find I was here first." He turned his head, smiling with a mad, infectious sort of glee. "So. Wanna help?" 

_Well, what about that?_ Eames was bemused. This was perfect, really. He could let Cobb take the risks and then, once they were out from under governmental control, he'd pull the easier job and steal the PASIV from Cobb. What could be more perfect?

"Yeah... sure."

Cobb nodded, amiable and unconcerned and apparently totally oblivious to what Eames was thinking. "I always work better with someone at my back," he said, and Eames felt his mouth drop open in horror, because what the _fuck_ , was Cobb actually stupid enough to think he could _trust_ Eames?

"Nope," Cobb said. "But your mirror-writing's really pretty badly spelt."

Eames looked down into the rock pool and groaned in horror as he saw his thoughts, badly spelled and badly written, cross the water's surface. In, as Cobb had so helpfully mentioned, mirror-writing, because apparently today was the day his brain channelled da Vinci.

"What the —"

"I told you." Cobb was still smiling, serene and a little mad and Eames wanted to _hit him_. "I steal secrets. And you, sir, with your too-charming poker face, like anemones in rockpools. I just had to go looking."

**

**Arthur, then**

The patch of sun shining through the window was just large enough to encompass Arthur, his oversized cushion, and his CD player. It was set to play the sound of rain which the warm sun rather negated, but Arthur could never relax if he was cold. So, gentle rain, warm sun, eyes closed and his body relaxed. He didn't care what the fuck the doctor said, more drugs would not help him recover from what was ailing him. He'd much rather have white noise that was overridden only by the gentle sounds of the house around him, a few creaks and pops and the movement that was Mal fixing lunch in the kitchen, or possibly preparing Molotovs with a home-made preservative, ready for storage. The candles he had lit were geranium scented, which blended oddly but comfortingly with the herbs she was using.

It wasn't that the drugs wouldn't have been useful if Arthur had, in fact, been suffering from any of the various imbalances Mal had so helpfully diagnosed him with months before. What they _weren't_ going to help with were the after-effects of incredibly experimental PASIV testing and pushing the boundaries of sleep-deprivation as a side order. Mal had simply gone for an obvious legal reason to get him out of the test-subject group before he _did_ end up with not only her military-cobbled assessments, but a whole other untreatable group of problems to go with them.

"Arthur, darling, lunch will be ready in about fifteen minutes, " Mal's voice came to him quietly from the dining room doorway. 

"Okay, Mal," Arthur answered as he slowly opened his eyes.

She looked beautiful, as always, her skin slightly flushed from the heat of the kitchen, one curl falling forward over her forehead, but also a bit agitated.

"What's wrong?"

"Oh, nothing. My fiancé is off attempting to liberate a top secret device from the United States Army. What could be wrong?"

Oh... that.

"Everything is planned and overplanned, Mal. " Arthur rose to his feet. "I would have gone with him if I could, but... well... you know I'm not exactly welcome on the base anymore."

He was discharged, after all, for medical reasons although honourably. That still didn't mean he was welcome.

No-one wanted the potential for as much disaster as Arthur supposedly carried with him, wandering around where that same potential could lay his hands on firearms.

There was only so much, after all, that the military _could_ cover up. And they didn't really have a reason to trust the idea that all Arthur's tendencies did, as Mal had carefully stipulated, lie only towards taking his own life, and not that of everyone around him.

In order to trust that, they would have to be ignorant of just what he had been doing for them. And unfortunately, they were quite decidedly not.

It even made Arthur grateful for his bouts of insomnia. No sleep meant no dreams. And no dreams meant no waking up in the middle of the night with a panic attack, or screaming so loud that it had Dom crashing into his room with a baseball bat to see who was murdering him.

"Yes, I know." Mal nodded at him. "And I am probably just being silly, but I still worry for him. And I worry for you, as well. Is the meditation helping at all?"

"Yes. No. Maybe." Arthur shrugged. "Sometimes I think so and other times not so much. But it still beats being drugged insensible."

Mal winced. "It had to be proved. At least you were responding. Or rather not responding, which is what I was aiming for."

It was as much of an apology for her methods of 'proof' as he was ever going to get, he knew, but it still stung. Knowing that Mal had used him as much as the military had, used him officially to prove the efficacy of sedatives on Somnacin-induced psychosis, and unofficially simply to get him the hell out of there, was going to be a sore spot for a while.

It simply did not _help_ , knowing that she had chosen the only possible escape-route, did nothing to alleviate the feeling that he had been disposable for a very long time and would be again as soon as Mal ceased to be interested in 'fixing' the mistake she blamed herself for.

Oddly, it wasn't that particular mistake, where she had decided he had the capacity to act as her control subject and then left the rest of the testing process to less-gifted chemists, which still bothered him. It was the fact that when she had realised that mistake, she hadn't bothered to tell him how, exactly, she planned to rectify it.

He was tired of being left out of the loop — which was why he had gone to such pains to ensure he was the one who had devised every stage of Dom's 'mission' to steal — because yes, that was what it was, and Mal's more grandiose term 'liberate' didn't change that at all — the PASIV from the same people who had made his sleeping processes into a new kind of hell.

"It's alright, Mal. I'm alright." It was a lie, but one that was kind to both of them. And lies were preferable to going over the same ground, again and again. Doing that reminded him too much of the testing. Of dying, over and over. Of being tortured and brainwashed and — well, other things that were just as painful — again and again until he had dreaded the sight of the damned fucking needles. 

It was over now. He was getting better. It was just taking so damned long.

And the only way that even half of it could be put right was if Dom succeeded, and they had the chance to go under and set his mental defences back up.

Mal's whole being was wrapped up in Dom getting out in one piece, PASIV in hand or not, because she wanted him safe.

Arthur was rapidly getting to the point where he didn't care what state Dom came back in, as long as he had even the hope of regained stability within his grasp.

And that, _that_ was the conversation they both knew was always being had, and was never going to be had.

In one sense, though, and for one reason only, Arthur _did_ hope that Dom remained unscathed.

And that was because he was damn sure he wouldn't be able to trust Mal with what remained of his working neurons if something went wrong with his meticulous, detailed planning, and Dom was hurt.

He wouldn't be able to trust her at all, if that happened.

**

**Eames, then**

In the end, it was all a lot easier and less risky than the route that Eames had planned to take. Well, at least on the surface, and it certainly involved a lot less running and a distinct lack of being shot at, for which he was very grateful. Underneath its seemingly facile and childish simplicity (walk in, walk out with the PASIV, don't say anything and then clear right the hell out as fast as possible before anyone notices) it was all extensively planned and well thought out, and made Eames wonder just who this Dom Cobb really was and if he had some kind of multiple personality disorder. 

The Cobb he was seeing was brilliant, he'd give him that, but there was no way that the man had the patience to plan out something that was as fucking detailed as this operation.

And he definitely wasn't the man who'd planned what was going to happen after they _left_ Area 51, because when the two men from whichever dodgy hiring outfit the idiot military had fixed on as their hired killers _this_ time (God forbid they get any of their precious men's hands dirty with taking out thieving trash) came into the underground parking garage where Cobb had said they were to change cars, Dom's radar didn't even flicker at them. 

It was as if he'd never done anything illegal before in his life, as if he was completely devoid of the sixth sense that told him when something was going to happen.

No second skin for Dom Cobb to slip into, then, so multiple personality was probably out.

Eames shot the men as soon as they got into range (neat head-shots, no point in wasting time worrying about what they might be able to say later), and turned back to find Dom staring at him in horror.

"You —" he started, and then shut his mouth, hard. "Okay," he muttered, instead of the diatribe Eames had expected. "Okay, right, yeah. That. That. It's. Whew." He breathed out in a long controlled sigh, and then swallowed, hard. "Thanks."

"No trouble," was Eames's only answer, mildly impressed as he was by Cobb's recovery. And it had been none. Eames had never had a problem with taking out someone who was going to do their best to make him dead—and it had been a long time since he'd bothered to know enough about his targets to feel guilt about it either... mostly. 

Mostly. And that little weasel word was why he was in America and not back in England where he belonged. 

Mostly. 

Because sometimes, he remembered, and he let himself feel, and it all had a tendency to go to hell at that point, so he tried not to let himself do that. "Let's go then, yeah, you think, shall we? Before someone comes to investigate."

"No. Right. Wait." Dom paused, his eyes flashing around the garage. "Eames, not like I've done this before, but I'd guess we'd probably be safest taking their car and then dumping it later. I don't know that I'd trust the one they were supposed to be bringing us."

"Too right." Eames agreed.

So Cobb _did_ plan, and he planned fast, but he was best on the go, best when he was reacting. He'd taken the whole thing of what it meant — really meant, not theoretical joy-riding style meant — straight into his brain and come up with an added layer of solution in seconds.

He didn't even seem unduly troubled by the two bodies, after his initial shock.

But the original plan that had led them both to the underground parking? Yeah, that couldn't have been Cobb in a million years.

On the other hand, it had to be someone who knew him really, really well.

They drove the car to the nearby bus station, bought tickets, took a cab to the airport, bought tickets on three different flights, checked in for two and then waited not-very-patiently to get on the third. It might not cover their trail entirely but it would certainly confuse any tails they might have picked up. Eames would have been happier with an evening lying low to get Cobb a couple of false IDs prepared, but they didn't have that kind of time budget, what with the two corpses and the fact that just about everyone in the whole fucking intelligence _and_ military world probably wanted to get their hands on the PASIV now, and weren't going to be very nice about the process.

"Where are we going?" Eames finally asked over the rim of the gin and tonic he was drinking. Cobb was drinking what Eames had learned to call club soda. With a lot of plain house vodka in it. Something small and cringing and very English in Eames wanted to tip it out and get him a drink that tasted like — taste. Or maybe just add some lemon.

"Home."

And just that one word made Eames want to take the PASIV from Dom then and there, take it and run and not look back on what was bound to be a look of uncomprehending betrayal, because no. _No_. He was not going to see someone else's idea of domestic bliss, just because they'd had a better plan than him didn't mean he had to play at being someone that Cobb so obviously was and that he wasn't sure he had ever been, not even when there was somewhere in his life that he had owned a key to and been not only welcome at but expected.

"Yeah, that's probably not such a good —"

"I'm putting a team together," Dom said, earnest and sincere and painfully open, _Christ, he's going to have to learn how to hide himself better than this if he wants to keep ahead of the military_ , Eames thought half-despairingly, and then reminded himself that he didn't care. "I'm going to turn dreamshare on its head. And that's what you wanted to do, isn't it? Or that's what you've convinced your own mind you want, which is pretty much the same thing, and you helped me, man, you helped me when you didn't have to, what kind of shitty person would I be if I let you do that and then never even offered you a breathing space? All the things you want to tear down and destroy, all that stuff in your head I saw in the rockpool, come on, why do it alone?" His hand closed over Eames's wrist, stilling his tapping fingers. Eames, who hated above all things being manipulated by fake-friendly attempts at touch, found himself curiously disinclined to react to this approach with violence. 

It wasn't that Dom was harmless, exactly — the dream-beach experience had shown he was dangerous enough to take out the heads of several crime rings, if he decided that was the way he wanted to go — but he was completely free from any sort of desire to _cause harm_ , and that was rare enough to make Eames stop himself from reacting, and pause, and listen to what Cobb wanted to say.

"Come back with me," was what he said, straightforward offer, no bribes or sweeteners, just a call before the game had really got going. "Come on, give it a try. If you hate it, you can leave. Any time you want, you can leave. No strings, no-one will come after you. But I think you might find it's okay."

"I'm not exactly a team sort of player," Eames pointed out. Getting one person away, well, yeah, sure. He could do crappy little runs like that in his sleep. But joining a _team_? One that Dom seemed to think of as family, as _home_ , and that almost definitely included whatever crazy bastard had designed the original plan to steal the PASIV? 

Christ, he'd have to have lost what remained of his brain to agree to that.

"Look, you're going back with me for the moment anyway, you might as well come and take a look, for God's sake." Dom pointed out the obvious with a sigh, and sat back in his chair, letting Eames go. 

And yeah, okay, when he put it like that, it couldn't really hurt, could it? Taking a look, at least, while he lay low for a while? Besides, Eames rationalised, he'd need more time if he was going to take the PASIV, anyway, because just now it was tucked under Dom's seat like an egg he was hatching.

Christ knew what kind of fledgling he was hoping for.

"Fine," Eames said with bad grace, and sat back in his own chair, folding his arms in case Dom got some idea about further hand-holding. "And I can leave any time, yeah?"

"Any time you like," Dom agreed, but his eyes had the slightly frightening gleam back in them, the one that belonged to the seashore and the rockpools and secrets that were written on water like Keats's embittered name, and Eames had the distinct feeling he was, for once, in well over his head.

**

**Dom, now**

Dom forced himself up off of the couch and into the kitchen. If he didn't clean off the dinner dishes and get them into the dishwasher he'd have concrete potatoes and gravy to deal with in the morning — never a pleasant task.

He never had minded housework, which was probably a good thing considering that as much as Mal liked cooking and feeding people, she had asked him more than once why they couldn't just throw out the dishes when they got dirty and buy new. It had often made him wonder if Miles and Marie had every made their daughter do chores when she was small or if they had just had a full time nanny/maid who had followed Mal around to ensure she came up out of her chemistry texts long enough to eat and take a bath. He would have been certain that was the case if she hadn't also seemed so well socialized.

It had taken him a while to realise that it was not chores that Mal hated particularly, but the way they didn't seem to _give_ anything. If she cooked, she could give people a meal; if she came up with new variations on Somnacin, they gave people an easier awakening or a smoother transition or less of a hangover; if she helped devise a scenario for the dreamscape, she was acting as a host, making others' minds the venue for a party all would admire.

Chores, for Mal, gave nothing to anyone bar a removal of mess. And Dom could see her point — why bother expending effort on removing something when it could simply be taken out of existence in seconds?

Mal, whose mental processes had all the patience of a high-speed internet connection, was never going to find satisfaction in the mere accomplishment of a set task.

And in that, she was horribly like her father.

_Miles... Miles... Miles..._

They had made a peace, of sorts, after all these years and all the mileage on both of them, but from the beginning it had been touch and go.

Miles, inventive and brilliant, giving the world the PASIV and his only daughter as part of the deal. Discovering the ideas behind dream sharing, finding a way to make it a usable, saleable, item and then convincing the military that they wanted it, all within a matter of a few years, and then adding the codicil of Mal's involvement to help control everything, never giving an inch, to make sure that although the US Army had the PASIV it still belonged to him.

Dom had known barely half of that when he set out to take the PASIV away from Area 51; Mal had suspected it but refused to believe she was unable to see through her father's intentions, and valued her own skills too highly to contemplate the idea that she could be part of a final deal and endgame; Arthur and Eames had, for their own quite separate reasons, been too suspicious of the military set-up as it had appeared to them ever to imagine that the man who had first built the PASIV still controlled it.

None of them, with all their different approaches to dreamshare, had thought that Miles was capable of viewing human life as collateral, that he was playing a game in which they were all, still, being used, that everything which had happened from the first moment Mal and Arthur had begun to talk to one another, and Dom had arrived at the base as a consultant, had been exactly according to Miles's plan.

Miles didn't want control. Dom might have found that easier to forgive.

He had it already, and he wanted to use it his own way.

And none of them had mattered, except in what use they could be to him. Not Mal and her brilliance and her fantastical urge to always give others their hearts' desires; not Dom and his training and his ideas and his half-obliterating love for Mal; not Arthur's precise mind, brought to the brink of sanity to make him imagine the impossible; not even chameleon Eames, given the impetus of hatred for shoddy workmanship and a need for his own kind of revenge, Eames who should have never even appeared on Miles's radar.

All of them, carefully chosen and as carefully used. And while Dom could see the need for it, while he understood the compulsion to keep control of one's own creation, he would never, ever understand why Miles had let them believe they were safe, that they were independent, that they were away from all the testing and the incessant mental invasions and the charted paths towards the edge of psychosis.

He had let them believe they had brought about their own safety. He had let them believe the lives they were making for themselves were real. He had let them believe they had made themselves a sanctuary, and a haven, and a home, and that they were truly happy, truly content — not because they were being allowed to be, but because they were crafting it for themselves, because they had found a sort of freedom.

He had never once let them see the walls and bars of the prison he had so beautifully, painstakingly built for them, and he had let them believe that their waking illusions were reality, and the dreams a sublime magic they built and controlled — and chose to wake from at their own pleasure.

And _that_ , Dom knew, he might well never forgive at all.

Men were dead. Men that they had killed. Men that were only a footnote in Miles's plans.  
It had taken years and some fundamental adjustments to Miles's way of thinking to bring their interactions around to what they were today. And most of all, it had taken the death of his only daughter.

"Dad..." Philippa's voice called out from the living room. "Daddy?"

"In the kitchen, sweetie. What do you need?"

"James puked on my bed. I told him not to hide that bowl of Grandpa's guacamole under the bed but he did it anyway and then ate it after dinner. "

"Oh, God..."

"My bed has green lumpy icky stuff all over it... ."

"Oh, _God_ ," Dom repeated, with feeling.

Somehow, it wasn't much of a consolation to be aware of the fact that even if Mal had lived, he would still have been the one dealing with regurgitated guacamole in the middle of the night.

He sighed.

"I'll be there in a minute..."

After he checked there was still enough Scotch in the bottle, following an evening with his favourite locusts, to give him a very large drink as a reward for clean-up duty.

**

**Dom, then**

The drive from the base was dully uneventful, a bit of unseasonable rain slowed traffic slightly, but that was probably the most interesting thing that happened. Dom drove and Eames sat quietly in the passenger seat doing... something with his hands. Dom could not call it fidgeting, really, the movements were too well planned. It was almost as if Eames were testing each muscle group, checking to be sure they were all in normal working order and would sustain him if called into use.

They rolled up to Dom's home not an hour after they left the airport, pulled into the garage and climbed out. Dom let Eames take the silver suitcase containing the PASIV out of the trunk, while he led the way to the door. Honestly, what did it matter who brought it? They had what he'd gone for _and_ Dom had stolen another potential team member, and success already tasted sweet at the thought of how well he had done.

"Mal? Arthur?" Dom called happily as they entered the house. "I'm back."

In retrospect, and as Mal was quick to point out to him once things were a bit quieter, what happened next (which turned out to involve an absence of the celebratory champagne he'd been envisaging, although sadly not an absence of things going bang) was entirely his fault. Arthur stepped out from behind the door and put his gun to Eames's head, saying very, very calmly,

"Put the case down."

Eames promptly hit him in the nuts with said case. Before turning around to try and repeat the gesture in Arthur's _face_ , which earned him a broken arm and smashed fingers with the side of the gun, which —

All in all, Dom was very glad when Mal arrived with the shotgun and made them both stop. He just wished she hadn't fired into the ceiling, because that was going to be a complete bitch to explain to the insurance company.

**

"Really, mon cher, truly, my dear dear idiot, you have a phone." Mal told him over her shoulder as she sat a bag of ice carefully in Arthur's lap. "Why have it if you are not going to use it?"

Arthur, Dom saw, was sitting very gingerly. Not a surprise, considering, but even with that he was still calmly splinting Eames's arm and hand. He hadn't apologized for breaking them, but then again, Eames didn't appear to expect him to. The whole setup was making Dom wonder if in fact he had got his assessment of Eames wrong, and that maybe he _was_ military, and this was all some elaborate double-cross, but it was highly unlikely that his rockpool-extraction of secrets had been wrong, so it was more likely that Eames was now conning _Arthur_. Which, _why_ , when he didn't need to lie about that aspect of things any more?

It was enough to make anyone head for the scotch. Dom, who was trying very hard not to be a generic anyone, decided to ignore whatever was playing out on his new couch, hoped blood wasn't going to be involved any time soon, since he was bound to be the one who ended up trying to get it _out_ of the couch rather than taking samples from it for future study as Mal probably would, and turned his attention back to the only one in the room who currently deserved it — and expected it.

"Yes. Yes. Yeah, I'm an idiot. But you, my love, are trigger happy." Dom allowed himself a small smile. "Maybe I shouldn't allow you to play with Arthur any more."

Mal made a face at him. "Arthur did not leave me the gun to protect myself with. You did. After I chose it. And tonight there was too much noise, and I protected my eardrums beautifully. I have therefore been a most obedient fiancee."

It might have come off better if her eyes hadn't been crossed at him while she delivered the entire speech without any inflection at all. Dom sighed.

"Like a mule, yeah, that obedient," he agreed, and his eyes went back, irresistibly, to the ill-assorted and wincing pair on the couch. "Mal, don't you think they should have painkillers?"

"I think they should have tranquillizers for horses, speaking of mules," Mal said dryly. "Would anyone here like some generic white pills that I made only two weeks ago that have not yet been tested?"

"Fuck no," said Arthur, not even looking up.

"Yes _please_ ," said Eames, which was equally not a surprise, and then "Ow, I need that circulation, you psycho."

"The psycho here is setting your arm, shut up," Arthur said.

"Without _painkillers_ , my lovely, you're not being very endearing —"

"Like your endearments, oh my, however shall I cope?" Arthur's voice managed to be even flatter than Mal's attempt at playing the patient Griselda.

"Oooh, _word_ play," said Eames lecherously. "Dom, you never told me what a kinky setup you had here — owowowowowOW FUCKING OW WHAT —"

"I think that should hold," Arthur said.

Dom blinked at them.

"So, who is this you have brought us?" Mal asked. She had gone through to the kitchen, fiddling with food, because while Arthur snarked to bring things back to normal, Mal fed people, just as, oddly enough, her father tended to with his graduate students when they brought him problems out of office hours. The simple motions of grinding coffee, putting the kettle on, building sandwiches, were done so automatically that it might have been a family Sunday afternoon — if it were not for the hole in the ceiling and the bits of plaster he was still picking out of his hair.

When he put it like that it was in fact almost _exactly_ like, in the weird new way his family weekends had recently become.

"This is Eames," Dom said with a faint wince that put him in the club of People With Pained Expressions, because right, yes, that was where he should have started out, wasn't it?

"Of course it is..." Arthur muttered as he cleared up the first aid kit. "Is that supposed to mean something to us, Dom?"

"He helped me steal the PASIV," Dom continued, happy in those few seconds where no-one knew the full story and Mal wasn't going to try and hug a broken-armed Eames and Arthur wasn't shouting at him. Then, remembering, he was a lot less happy, and cut them both off before they could get started. "And he killed two guys in the underground parking lot where _someone_ , no names mentioned, said they had a meet sorted to change cars. I never knew it meant change a car for Charon's boat."

Mal took one step that turned her around completely and took her away from the counter, and then stood very still in the doorway, sandwiches and kettle forgotten entirely, whispering his name, stricken, _Dom, darling, Dominique, non_ , and Arthur wheeled on Eames.

"You killed my contacts?"

"But oh my darling, oh my pet," Eames said, and the words, coming from his so-English voice in that oddly rhythmic arrangement were somehow familiar to Dom, something that sounded as though it came from college, when he wasn't paying attention to something other people were doing — which to be fair had been ninety percent of the time, so why this struck a chord he wasn't really sure — "they weren't yours. They really, really weren't yours. They were military employees and if you bought them? Not enough money. Ever heard of margins, Arthur dear?"

Arthur glared at him wordlessly before apparently giving up, and attacked his second target instead. "Dom, are you saying you two botched a perfectly simple —"

"Hey!" Dom held his hands up in defence. "I wasn't the one who chose them —"

"I had a plan, you know I had a plan, all you had to do was _follow_ it, fuck —"

"And it went tits up and I got Dom out. And then he got me out," Eames added, which was not quite true and very kind of Eames and _exactly_ the right thing to say, because Mal stopped standing impossibly still and went to push Arthur out of the way and check on the bone-setting for herself, as if Eames were another form of sandwich that needed arranging to her personal satisfaction. 

Eames's expression was less one of pleasure at the attention and more one of _fucking hell, what, help,_ which was affording Dom too much satisfaction to try and stop her.

Then Dom frowned, because Arthur just stepped back, his face a carefully controlled mask. He carried the first aid kit to the kitchen, put it away, and then started to walk out the door without saying anything.

"Arthur. Hang on!" Dom called after him. Letting Arthur walk away when things like this happened was never a good idea. He'd spend days blaming himself and double-thinking every decision until everyone was ready to... well... make him earn another go-round with an ice bag in his lap, basically. 

Mal, out of everyone, would probably _ensure_ he needed it, since she had zero patience for self-analysis in anyone and less than that for Arthur's peculiar form of tying his own psyche in knots.

"Eh, let me go," Eames said, pushing himself up awkwardly with his free arm. He looked a bit out of it, despite the lack of experimental drugs, and Dom squinted at him, assessing his ability.

"Now why would you want to do that —"

"Cos it's kind of mostly my fault," Eames said with a shrug, and Dom looked over at Mal.

"Let him try, my darling," she said. "He will at least not hold back on your Eames from trying to be nice."

"He's not my —" Dom started, and gave up as Eames wandered out, no more swagger and slouch, but the upright distinctive posture Dom had first seen in the base, the military man. "Oh now that's _clever_ ," he murmured, and Mal came over to curl into his lap.

"What is?"

"He's pulling military on him. You didn't fuck up, thus saith the lord of rules. In language Arthur'll make himself listen to."

"Oh he _is_ clever." Mal hummed her approval. "But Dom, I don't care, I am sorry but you know I don't care, I've missed you and missed you and you brought me a beautiful present and —"

"Bedroom," Dom said immediately, standing up as she wrapped her legs around him.

"Oh, but _yes_. Mm, no scaring the children..."

Dom, rather vaguely, hoped he wouldn't be burying anyone in the morning.

**

**Arthur, then**

Arthur was standing on the top landing of the beach steps, looking towards the low-tide rush of water below. It was always something, no matter how hard he tried to be perfect. No matter how he studied and thought things out and researched, he was still, somehow, found wanting. As much as he enjoyed working with Mal and Dom, a part of him was always waiting for them to discover how useless he was and replace him with someone else. Maybe Eames would be the one. He looked tough in a way that Arthur would never be able to pull off, and seemed quick and intelligent and far more imaginative and creative than Arthur ever thought he could be.

It was all as inevitable as the tide, really, and fuck ups like the one he'd just committed would only make it arrive all the sooner.

"It's not a screw up if you don't know your enemy," Eames said from behind him, and Arthur flinched. He was expecting Dom, who would talk him into some state of mind he didn't want to inhabit just yet, pleasant though it would undoubtedly be; or worse, Mal, who would soothe him into thinking his mistakes were negligible. But he was in no way prepared for the arrogant stupid headcase of a Brit who'd just walked in to rearrange his life, standing at a safe distance and deliberately looking out past him at the same ocean.

"But that's my job," Arthur said wearily, to the damp, night-greyed sand that rose up over the lower steps, into the hushing of attempted surf over a tiny groundswell; saying it to the rubbing, glass-like, almost fragile sound of tiny stones, as they ground away to less than pebbles and more than sand beneath its persistent, erosive force. "So yeah, it is."

"And you trusted the military to follow procedure, and they didn't. So next time, you won't trust. Easy."

"And that's what it takes, is it? To be a man who walks out on people who are supposed to be his _brothers_ and steals a PASIV and takes up with a stranger. That's what it takes, it's that fucking easy. Wow. Thanks for the platitudes, but I'll pass." And God, considering that was basically exactly what _he'd_ done, he really should have stopped talking before he started, because whoever this guy really was, he'd been nice enough to come out and try to say something, and he didn't need Arthur's issues used against him for no good reason except an inability to take criticism and an ability to _see_ criticism everywhere.

But there was only silence from behind him, and Arthur turned round, meaning to apologise, and saw bewilderment in Eames's twisted mouth.

"I never mean to," he said quietly, "but yeah, I s'pose that's right." 

"What?" Arthur peered at him, his eyes already stinging even in the faint breeze. There was always more salt and pollen and tiny grains of sand in the air than he expected.

"Walk out on people," Eames said in the same odd voice, and then he shrugged. "I'm more of a runner, yeah? Don't do anything as slow as walk. Still doesn't mean you fucked up. Means you didn't know something."

"That's the same thing. I didn't look into what could — and Dom could have —"

"What if's a losing game," Eames said. "So don't play it. Those were your plans that got us out, yeah? So you. You play to win and you keep on learning your play, and you'll get there. And when you fail? Oh Arthur, don't look at me like that, it's going to be when, not if, because we all fail sometime, but you know what?" He smiled, a faint gleam of uneven teeth that showed only half of them in the dimly reflected light, an unwitting exposure that Arthur was later to learn meant he wasn't quite as in control as he sounded and acted, meant that sincerity had crept in there. "There'll always be someone like me to pick up the pieces. Or with a bigger gun. Hell, you never know, there might even be someone with a flamethrower if you need it. Don't be afraid to look at the bigger picture, seriously, with you lot it looks pretty damn solid, from the outside. I think — I — you know what, you can bet anything someone else is going to be right there with you, no matter how lost you feel. I get the feeling Dom's not the kind to let anyone go into this alone."

"I suppose that's what I'll have to hope for, isn't it?" Arthur asked, turning back towards the sea and feeling both strangely reassured and discomfited at once, for he hated to be seen through. After all, when hope failed, and oh, but it would fail, it would always fail, he'd have to deal with the consequences alone, just like always. "I just don't want anyone else to pay for my failure if hope isn't enough."

Eames sighed. "Hope's never enough, we all know that," he said, a little bitter-sounding. "But — yeah, I heard somewhere that when you mix it with a bit of faith and love, there's great things it can do for the old belief system."

His footsteps crunched off, but Arthur found what he'd said was left niggling at his brain, the way Mal's words sometimes did, as though he already knew them, or should.

Later that night, he typed in 'hope quotes' to Google, and found things ranging from the utterly depressing (Emily Dickinson, knowing that hope would always ask one last thing of you to be granted, that it was never a boon) to the strangely foreboding (Twain, who had some idea that it was a tree which would eventually lose all its strength) and then, finally and obviously, he found what Eames had been referring to —

Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am full known.  
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. 

Bible verses had been the last thing that he'd expected to be quoted, but he had to admit to the truth of the statement if Mal and Dom were anything to go by. They seemed to love in a way that was almost uncomfortable to anyone on the outside looking in. They got so lost in each other that it was often as if no one else existed. What would it be like, he wondered to be loved like that? Or even half as much? 

It was almost a frightening thought.

Years later, of course, years that had included death and disappearance and heartache — for good and foolish reasons both — he had finally understood what Eames had been trying to tell him: not the importance of love above all things, but the need for all three of those tangled emotions and beliefs to remain in your core-self, if you wanted to stand any chance of making the knowledge you gained by dreaming bearable. 

Faith that the world would be set right, hope that it could be, love that waited for when it was.

And love, which waited, was the greatest of all those things not because it overpowered them — but because it held those two other essentials up, it sustained their light in the darkest and worst of times, it inspired men to act upon them.

All those years later, when Arthur was tired beyond imagining and losing all hope and had long since been made bereft of faith, when he was left behind in a Paris warehouse while Dom took a chance on a throw of dice that Arthur had so ironically chosen for his constant — all those years later, he was to learn that because of Eames, those three things had come together for Dom in a seedy bar in Mombasa.

_It's not impossible. It's just bloody difficult._

Eames, it seemed, for all his running, had never lost his awareness of what he said that night, nor their importance.

_Faith, hope, and love._

And in Mombasa, a half-drunk and increasingly derelict Eames, who at that moment was making a promise he might well not be able to keep, and relying on Yusuf to be everything in dreamworld competency that the maverick chemist never managed to be in any other way — choosing Yusuf to demonstrate this, because living dichotomy of venal superstition though he might be, he was none the less a good friend, and he had somehow been both hope and faith to Eames, in those dark, appalling years — Eames suddenly needed no help to make that old truth clear once more, and in that one small perplexed moment, he gave back to Dom the two other things he needed to believe in himself again.

_Faith, and hope_.

For Dom, as Arthur by then had already learnt to his cost, had never, ever stopped believing in the all-consuming greatness of what love could do.

**

Eames fit in reasonably well. Arthur had expected him to vanish as soon as he could, but like everyone else drawn into Dom's haphazard orbit, he was helpless before the power of 'just one more day, just so we can try —', and was still there a week later, still almost without possessions other than some clothes Mal had dragged him off to buy (the familiar look of having been assaulted by a very nice-smelling, attractive bulldozer that he wore when they came back had Arthur not terribly successfully stifling laughter), and still watching them all as though he were waiting for more demonstrations of shotguns and arm-breaking.

The look on his face when Dom did his morning zombie impression and Mal had already vanished into the shower, leaving Arthur to be the one employing evasion tactics and Eames, by default, in the position of Nearest Warm And Upright Thing, was absolutely priceless.

"Does he do this... often?"

"Daily." Arthur replied as he turned on the coffee maker. "I've never yet decided if I find it disturbing or endearing."

Apparently, neither could Eames, but rather than scooting away and leaving Dom adrift to the mercies of Arthur or a less satisfactory cupboard or wall, he just shuffled around the kitchen, putting the kettle on and making tea for himself as if he didn't have 180 pounds of adult male using him as a leaning post. It didn't make sense to Arthur, but Eames was British, so who knew? 

Maybe it was a cultural thing.

"Dom, I need my working arm back," he said at one point, sounding irritable and vaguely amused with it. "Christ, how do you get him back to sentience?"

"Er, you can't, you just give him coffee and hope," Arthur said, trying not to laugh as Eames heaved the sigh of the incredibly put-upon and tried to reach up to the cupboard where the teapot had somehow migrated to without letting Dom fold up in a heap.

"Here." Arthur reached past him and handed it down.

"Ta, mate." 

Eames continued with his one-armed preparations until Mal finally returned from the shower, took pity on him and shoved a cup of coffee under Dom's nose, directing the somnambulant man to a chair.

"Arthur, shame on you," she scolded.

"What?" That was it. Arthur could no longer contain his giggles. Mal just looked incredibly disappointed in him, which worked for all of five seconds, mostly because Dom seemed to be trying to drown himself in his mug and Eames was just standing there looking utterly confused.

"Right, um, what'd I miss?" he asked.

"The part where you don't have an arm to spare for sleepwalkers," Mal said kindly, "which Arthur should know, since he is, I think, responsible for _why_ you don't."

Arthur was almost inclined to look sheepish from the scolding, except the fact that he was still tender and sore from where his nuts had made far too intimate an acquaintance with a metal suitcase. It somehow made him feel just the slightest bit justified in his inappropriate humour. 

" _You_ murdered the ceiling," he said instead, but took over the teapot and fixed tea for Eames without another word.

Mal rolled her eyes at him, but she seemed less irritated and more fond, which was always a relief when one considered just what power she had over the future of his body's chemical constituency. Dom snorted coffee up his nose and came rather wildly awake, which Mal and Arthur ignored and Eames just stared at as though he was watching an aquatic lifeform of unknown species in a suddenly-appearing tank.

"Um..." he said, with an obvious lack of any sort of idea as to where he or his fragmented sentence beginning should go next.

"Drink your tea," Arthur said, and decided not to pursue why Eames's look of gratitude made him feel infinitely better than Mal's forgiveness.

"Dom, my love," Mal leaned over and murmured into the back of his neck, "drink your coffee and wake up. We have things to get done today. Important things."

Arthur frowned, "We do? Are we doing trials today?"

Mal waved a hand while she helped Dom get upright and begin to drink his coffee, "Hmmm? Oh yes, that, but later. We... the two of us... today we go Shopping."

And yes, it was said with a capital 'S' and italics included.

"Shopping? For what?"

If a scowl could remove the top layers of someone's skin, Arthur had just been abraded.

"I told you last week, Arthur." Mal spoke patiently, in spite of the scowl. "Today Dom and I meet Maman to look for our Clothes."

Really, it was amazing how many of Mal's words were italicized, capitalised, and all kinds of horribly emphasized lately.

"Oh, fuck my life," Dom groaned into his coffee. "Mal, _no_."

"Mal, yes, Dom, yes, wake up, get yourself together and _shave_ ," Mal said firmly.

Dom's moan sounded like Arthur had always imagined a tortured soul in hell would, but he staggered to his feet.

Arthur quickly refilled Dom's cup before he and Mal left the kitchen.

"I'm missing something a bit obvious here, aren't I? Clothes?" Eames raised one eyebrow over the top of his teacup.

"For the wedding," Arthur widened his eyes and raised his eyebrows for emphasis, since he couldn't quite manage italics.

"Oh." Apparently Eames needed vast amounts of caffeine in the mornings as well, even if he acted more alert than Dom, because he frowned for a moment and then asked — "Whose?"

"Theirs?" Arthur said obviously, making it sound like a question more because he was utterly bewildered than for any other reason.

"You mean they're _not_?"

"No, which is why they have to get clothes?" Arthur was beginning to feel the world slip sideways into surrealism.

"Right," Eames said, still looking blankly confused, and then, "Er, right, I have to go out. Can I go out?"

"We're not exactly keeping you prisoner," Arthur said crossly.

"No, really, I hadn't worked that out, thank you, Arthur. I meant is anyone still looking for us? Well, me, I'm sure Dom's been —" He snapped his mouth shut on the last, and Arthur felt suddenly and horrendously guilty.

"It's all been taken care of, you can go wherever you want," he said stiffly, and retreated to his room, where he cursed himself for being several varieties of idiot that for once had nothing to do with how good (or not) he was at his job, and a hell of a lot to do with what a fucking miserable excuse for a human being he could sometimes manage to exemplify.

_Brilliant, Arthur. Just brilliant. You couldn't even tell the poor fucker he was safe._

Safe because Arthur had been busy tying up loose ends... or having them tied up. It had been his mistake, after all, and so his to fix. Which he had, for all of them, including Eames. That had been a given, since Dom had brought him home. If Dom brought someone home that meant they were meant to be part of the team, and no matter what Arthur's feelings on the subject, that meant Eames was now to be treated as part of the team and so protected as such.

_Even if he was meant to replace you... maybe..._

"Oh God, shut _up_ ," Arthur moaned at his brain, and tried very hard to induce unconsciousness by smashing his head into his pillows.

**

**Eames, then**

Insomnia was an epidemic in Dreamshare. You couldn't have one without the other, it seemed, and Eames was no exception. He'd watched more insipid television and bloody awful infomercials since he'd been staying with Dom and Mal than he had in all years previously.

It was so bad that he was beginning to find the idea of a gadget that would cook your chicken while it stood up on its bum end to be a fascinating thing.

Mal was the other most frequent sufferer in their makeshift household — or at least the other one likely to move towards the general living area, which implied that Dom, at least, was capable of sleep. How Arthur dealt with it, if he had to, was something he obviously preferred to keep private and therefore a mystery Eames felt was best left unsolved.

Besides, he felt rather possessive of the odd, quietly spaced-out, mostly-silent early mornings he spent with Mal, both of them yawning and lethargic and utterly inclined towards any sort of activity, mental or otherwise.

(Which was probably fortunate, since he had a fair idea that if Mal had felt any more energetic, she would have been _buying_ the things advertised at crappy a.m.)

"Good morning, darling..." Mal sat down on the sofa next to him, slowly slumping down until her head was resting against his shoulder. "There is no sleep... again." She blinked at him. "You too?"

"I didn't even make an attempt," Eames admitted. "I had about fifteen minutes just after lunch and that appears to be all I'm allowed."

"Mmm-mmm... ." Mal nodded her condolences, her face scrubbing against the cotton of his shirt. "Were there dreams?"

"Yes," Eames told her. "But no, I'm not sharing them with you."

"You are insufferably mean." It was said with no heat, muffled as the words were.

"I know, I know," Eames said peacefully. "A man's got to have some secrets, though."

Mal snorted with vague amusement. "In this house? I wish you luck."

"All right, kindly-accepted _pretend_ secrets," Eames clarified. "Like fifteen minutes' worth of natural dreaming."

"Oooh, natural dreaming," Mal said wistfully. "I do not even have much of that, these days."

"Nothing you can do about that, eh?"

"Nothing that would allow them to be natural." Mal shrugged. "At this point I think my mind just wants some escape."

"Then you might as well use the PASIV," he scoffed, "because the crap we're watching is certainly no escape."

"Oh, darling, you're brilliant!"

"Thank you...er... why?" Eames turned his head and looked down at Mal, almost getting his face bashed by the top of her head when she suddenly bounced up.

"Give me a dream, darling. I want something new. Something I've not done. Someplace I've not been!"

Which might well not narrow it down in the slightest, given how little he knew of Mal's past.

"Er. Okay. You might want to get specific, here, since for all I know you're a regular globe-trotter on the side."

"In my alternate timeline," Mal agreed dryly. "No. Not much. And where I _have_ been has been for the main part inside labs. So it would not be a stretch."

"But what do you _want_ to see?" Eames repeated helplessly, and Mal laughed.

"I want to visit a painting," she said. "One you know."

"A painting?" Eames frowned in thought. "I suppose that would work. Get us set up, darling. I need to think a bit."

Mal scurried off to get the PASIV out of its not-very-secret spot under her bed, and presumably failed to wake Dom in the process, since no murmur of voices came through.

By the time she returned, he had the idea locked in his head. By the time they were hooked up and relaxing into the feel of Somnacin slipping into their veins he wondered if this was actually a good idea, but by the time they found themselves walking through a crowd of his projections he was, at least, resigned to going through with the whole thing.

It was quite a lovely setting, after all — _Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte._ The only changes he had made was in their style of dress — a green shirtwaist, walking skirt and small bustle for Mal and, if he did say so himself, he was quite dapper with his coat and top hat. The sun was warm, but the breeze off the water kept it from being uncomfortable.

He had chosen the most restful thing he could remember, filled with people who were either somnolent and lounging or strolling about lazily. The warmth was of the kind to sink in through clothes, seeping through tension and unravelling it, like a hot bath; the light of the hazy kind that came at the end of summer, rather than from the blur of pointillism, not too harsh even where it hit the water.

And Mal, half-amused and half-bored, spun her parasol in her gloved hand and looked around her with vague condescension.

"Your projections are comatose," she said pointedly. "I wanted new, not a sedative."

Eames rolled his eyes up to the softly blue sky and wondered how he could ever have been so stupid as to think Mal wanted to relax.

"Fine..." He frowned. "You want excitement? That's dead easy."

Eames lifted his walking stick and applied it liberally to the arse and shoulders of the man who had just walked past them. Suddenly the eyes of all the projections were on them.

"Mal... ."

"Yes?"

"Run!"

Mal went wide-eyed, started to laugh, and then did as she was told and sprinted across Seurat's rather too-perfect grass, skirt hoisted to above her knees. Some of the projections actually managed to look scandalised at the sight of her legs, which were definitely not in period-appropriate stockings.

Eames caught her up with relative ease, and they spent the rest of the dream-time fending off projections from a boat Eames was pretty sure Seurat hadn't painted, hitting projections with oars.

Mal seemed to take unholy glee in going for the face.

Eames found it remarkably relaxing to mimic her.

**

They came out from under the Somnacin giggling, their arms wrapped around each other, to find Arthur sitting on a chair next to them. His expression, if not actually disapproving, was certainly puzzled.

"Thank you, darling. That was the best ever," Mal leaned in and kissed him, the touch soft and gentle, almost tender.

Eames just smiled back at her, happy and moved, then turned to Arthur, "Did you need something?"

"I... um... I couldn't sleep."

"Grab an oar," Mal said dreamily, and giggled.

"You went rowing?" Arthur looked even more confused, if less disapproving. Apparently curiosity always won.

Mal just sprawled out on the sofa and laughed. 

"Er... well..." Eames tried, "we were..." It was irresistible. "Messing about in boats?"

Mal put a cushion over her face and cackled.

"Oh for fuck's sake," said Arthur irritably, and stomped off to the kitchen.

The sound of strangely aggressive coffee being made just heightened Mal's laughter.

"Smash," she said croakily.

Eames patted her on the head.

"Yes, Hulk," he agreed, blissfully wrung-out feeling as the endorphins buzzed languidly through him. "Smash."

" _Oooh,_ " said Mal.

"Er?" Eames was too soporific to be as wary as he should be.

Mal took the cushion away from her face. "Pictures are also in the comic books," she said, eyes wide and sparkling.

Eames thought about it, and grinned down at her. "Oh yeah," he said with lazy glee. "So they are."

**

**Dom, now**

Dom woke up feeling rather overwarm and damp, mostly because, after stripping off Philippa's bed, he had discovered that James's was in much the same shape, and had finally given up and dragged both of them off to sleep in his bed. He was now wrapped in two pint-sized furnaces who drooled in their sleep. 

"God... coffee..." Somehow, he managed to disentangle himself and stumble towards the kitchen where, thankfully, he had remembered to fill and set up the coffee maker the night before.

He sometimes missed the days when he could simply rely on other people to stop him killing himself, scalding himself, or just falling over in a sleepy heap.

Now there were two children and the coffee maker and him, and although he wanted neither Marie nor Miles around to witness his incompetence, he didn't want to have to shake himself awake every five seconds, either.

"Dominic, your mornings amuse me," Saito intoned from behind him, and Dom's hand jerked hard enough to send the jug (and water) skittering across the counter.

"Oh good," he said, looking for a cloth. "Really pleased."

"I am sorry if I startled you."

"I was just wondering how you got in here without my hearing you."

"Through the door."

It was, apparently, one of Saito's taunt-the-barely-awake-person mornings. "Of course. How else..."

"Allow me to take that." Saito took the carafe, got two mugs out of the cupboard and filled them. "Let me begin again. Good morning, Dominic."

"Go to hell, Saito," Dom said, and folded up into the nearest chair.

"But as you often say, my friend, this is hell, nor are we out of it."

"I do not say that," Dom protested vaguely. He _thought_ it, true, but he never _said_ it.

"Of course not," Saito agreed solemnly, and bent to prevent a suddenly-awake Philippa from doing terrible damage to his more essential parts as she skidded into the kitchen on socked feet. "Slippers, my child," he said in the tones of a public service announcement.

"James puked in my bed," Philippa responded.

Saito actually took a step back. Dom laughed into his arms, and closed his eyes.

"James is ill?"

Dom peered up at him. "James ate warm, two day old guacamole."

"Ah."

"I told him not to, but he never listens to me." Philippa told him, arms crossed and hip cocked in the stance of put-upon older sisters everywhere.

"James will learn with experience," Saito told her. "What would you like for breakfast?"

"Pancakes—!"

"—You don't need to cook, I'll be awake enough to do it in a minute," Dom interrupted.

"No you won't, daddy, you'll crack three eggs and then lean on Uncle Saito."

"Ah?" Saito managed.

"Philippa, darling, shut _up_ ," Dom moaned into his arms.

"Daddy does a zombie thing," Philippa explained to Saito, horribly loudly. "Like James only you can't pick him up. And Maman said that Eames-darling shuffled him best, but when she said it everyone got sad, so I stopped laughing at him."

Dom lifted his head up and glared at Saito.

"Don't _even_ —"

"It would not occur to me," Saito said smoothly, and stirred sugar into Dom's coffee.

"Pip... why don't you go see if James is feeling any better and if he is, you can both watch TV for a bit before breakfast."

"And I will make pancakes," Saito told her.

"Yay!!" Philippa practically danced out of the room.

"You don't have—"

"I volunteered."

"I... thank you. Thanks."

Saito sat the cup of well-sugared coffee down on the table and went back to rummage through the kitchen.

"Saito?"

"Yes, my friend."

"You helped Eames with the house-thing, right?"

"I did."

"Why?"

Saito turned around, a bag of badly-pegged flour in one hand and a whisk in the other, and smiled.

"I shall tell you as I told him. Because I was dying, and he gave me a grenade."

"Kill me now," Dom said to the ceiling, and fell asleep on the table to the sound of sizzling oil, and thinking of how he had learned mind-resistance by teaching it to Arthur, how 'Mr. Charles' had come into being, how all his best defence-building had come from hating, and hating, and _hating_ the very thing he had given most of his life up to.

The PASIV.

Arthur desperate, and Mal guilty, and Eames afraid, and he could only deal with one of those things, back then.

He had chosen Arthur.

They had spent days (in dream-time) sorting him out, and hours in real-time working on meditation and how to channel his natural dreams lucidly, to drive them away from the terror and back to more normal situations that he'd have control over. It was hard work for both of them, and they'd had more than their share of arguments and actual fist-fights over it, although the latter mostly took place in the dreamscape.

It had been gruelling, at times, but Dom couldn't regret any of it. It had removed the haunted expression from Arthur's face, and if that was replaced with a look that was much more calm and blank than any Arthur wore before volunteering for the Dreamshare project, it was only to be expected.

He had taken away Arthur's fear, and Mal had replaced it, unforgivably, with thoughts of love.

Unforgivably, because the subject she had chosen was still afraid himself.

Unforgivably, because she had been too wrapped up in her project to inform Dom of her ideas.

Unforgivably, because she had lulled two minds, not just one, into a sense of security, one with another.

And oh, how very very false it had all been.

Eames and Arthur, learning friendship.

Arthur learning that trust was not impossible, Eames that he was not always a traitor. Mal rejoicing in their becoming.

And Dom, who had never really seen anything but the failure of one man to understand another's love, assuming that no defence was necessary until it was all far, far too late.

It had all fallen apart. Eames one way. Arthur another. He and Mal left alone, if only for awhile. Arthur eventually coming back, because the baby was on the way, and Dom was terrified that he would be a horrible father. And Mal had begged Arthur to be Philippa's godfather and as usual, no matter what Arthur felt, he could refuse her nothing.

But it was never the same. Never could be, because three was not four and they all felt the loss more than anyone of them would admit.

"Your coffee has gone cold, Dominic."

"Wha... ?"

Saito laughed at him. Silently, and without even really smiling, but he was definitely laughing.

_And maybe,_ Dom thought, _maybe six is even better._

And he looked up at Saito with perfect blankness.

"So get me more," he said, completely deadpan.

_Ariadne, our unexpected fledgling, our reminder of what we once were._

"More sleep?"

_Arthur, my constant, my friend, my wall of Troy._

"Saito, if you can get me that, I'll love you forever."

_Yusuf, our changeling, who never wanted to be or replace Mal._

"That is not an incentive, my friend."

_Eames, who never left even when he ran._

"I'm hurt."

_Saito. Living out worlds in faith that I would come for him._

"You will survive."

"I always do," Dom agreed lightly, and then — "Saito —"

"Wait a while," Saito said, and Dom caught his breath, because how could he know, how — "I must whisk."

Right. Right.

Dom got to his feet, and went to rouse James.

**

**Arthur, then**

It felt very odd to Arthur, having the house all to himself, almost as though he were trespassing, in spite of the welcome he had always received from both Mal and Dom. Somehow, lacking their presence, that warmth and love drained out of the place and it felt more like a tidy showpiece... a hotel... than it did a home. Arthur had tried reading and watching some television before taking his laptop out to the beach steps, the farthest place he could still get a good internet connection.

The sound of a motorcycle with something terrible happening to its exhaust, pulling up at the front of the house, did absolutely nothing to jolt him out of the slightly surreal state of detachment he was in, until his brain caught up with his ears and he thought —

_Oh, fuck, motorcycle, what —_

He thought it showed remarkable composure on his part that he grabbed Mal's shotgun and checked it was loaded _before_ he came out of the front door.

It was not a feeling that Eames apparently shared, judging from his expression as he yanked his helmet off and stared at Arthur.

"Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you?" he demanded.

"Did you steal that?" Arthur snapped back, and oh. Yeah. Maybe he shouldn't have said that out loud.

Eames's sigh might not have been audible, but it was certainly visible. His shoulders rose and fell in an exaggerated movement of air. "Yes," he said flatly. "Yes, Arthur, I left the house, nicked a bike, and came back here to stash it — _no_ , obviously, what? How the fuck does your mind even _work_?"

Arthur gave a small huff, "Yeah, I suppose that even you have more sense than to steal a bike that sounds so close to its last legs."

The scowl on Eames's face had him wishing he hadn't said that. _Why the fuck did I say that? Why not... 'Sorry, Eames, you startled me.'_ That would have been a more... suitable response.

"Thank you," Eames said dryly. "Thank you so much, also yeah, I do, and why are you carrying Mal's gun — _oh_." His face screwed up in what looked like something verging on apologetic. "Fuck, sorry. Didn't mean to scare seven bells out of you —"

"Do you even speak English?" Arthur demanded helplessly, giving up in the face of unwanted understanding, and broke the shotgun over his arm. "Yeah, okay, so it was a bit loud." It was as much of an explanation as he was prepared to give.

"I found a shop," Eames said then. He looked like an optimistic cat that hadn't quite figured out why it got yelled at for bringing in still-living mice, but was prepared to keep trying in case this time it worked. "It's — yeah, it's this shop, and it's — you should come and see it."

"A shop..." All Arthur could do was frown at him with incomprehension. "A motorcycle shop? That's where you got the bike?"

"Um, sort of, yeah," Eames said. "I did get it there, but it's not a — look, you need to see this, okay? It's perfect."

Arthur looked at the clock. In another two, or possibly three, hours Dom and Mal would be back and Mal would either be gushing over their parfait wedding clothes or moaning that nothing could be found in such a provincial area and how they must plan a jaunt to Paris for something more suitable.

Either way, it was not something that Arthur was certain he wanted to experience, and he certainly hadn't failed to notice that Eames's own disappearances tended to end a mysteriously precise hour and a half after Dom and Mal returned from their latest expedition. "Okay, yeah... just let me..." He gestured at the shotgun.

"Right." Eames grinned at him, sudden and sharp. "You might want to think about carrying. Less worry."

Arthur, about to ask irritably _oh, like you do?_ realised that the answer would be _yes_ , and stopped himself. "Not in the house," he said instead, and turned his back on Eames's eye-roll.

Out of the house, though, he thought as he put the gun away, out of the house, that — that was only sensible.

It wasn't as though he'd exactly forgotten where he kept things.

He came back a few minutes later, adjusting the collar of his jacket, his revolver a comforting weight at the small of his back. It wasn't his favourite way to carry, but it was certainly less obtrusive in public, and since he no longer had the concealing sameness of wearing his uniform, he took such things into consideration. 

When he had gone out in uniform, that had been all that people had seen, but in civvies... he had to be more cautious.

"Where to?" He raised an eyebrow at Eames.

"Hopefully a car," Eames said, looking embarrassed. "I think this thing needs work."

"I think it needs scrapping," Arthur said in some relief, "and yes, car, absolutely car, God." He didn't want to consider how automatically he'd assumed the bike was the only option. That way madness definitely lay.

"You have one, yeah? Don't all Yanks?" Eames grinned at him crookedly, teasing.

"Yes, we all have a car... we all eat apple pie and wave Old Glory with one hand and eat a hot dog with the other." Arthur rolled his eyes, "As it so happens I do have a car... but I'm not allowed to drive it at the moment."

"Hm-nn," was Eames's response. "Why not?"

Arthur sagged a bit, "Because I'm supposed to be taking those..."

He pointed at five bottles full of tablets that were sitting on the kitchen countertop — an anti-hallucinogenic, an anti-depressant, a sedative, sleeping pills, and something that Eames obviously didn't recognise, judging by the way he turned the little orange bottle round and round in his hand as though it would give up its secrets if he just stared at it hard enough. "Only... I'm kind of not."

"Right," Eames said thoughtfully, "because that? I might just have noticed. Come to think of it, you needing them I might just have noticed. Okay." He shrugged. "S'pose I'm driving, then."

Arthur blinked at him. "Don't you want —"

"No," Eames said curtly. "No. I don't. I don't want to know. You don't need to explain one single fucking thing to me. You don't need them, you're not taking them, your papers say you are taking them and so you don't drive. Works for me. Are we going?"

"Huh..." Arthur just silently held out the keys to his car. "Yeah..."

Eames snagged them out of his hand and headed for the door.

_Wait. What?_ Had he really just given Eames the keys to his car?

"You do have a license to drive in the U.S. Wait. Don't you?" He hurried after Eames.

"Yes," Eames said, straight-faced. "I have a license to drive. And here I am. In the U.S." 

"Oh God," Arthur said. He wondered if he should bring the shotgun anyway.

**

All in all though, their trip to the shop was without incident. Eames was a surprisingly competent driver, their only mishaps being his repeatedly asking Arthur if he was 'sure' they were on the proper side of the road. By the time they arrived at the shop, Arthur was laughing good-naturedly about the running joke and ready to see whatever it was that Eames wished to show him.

Which was, apparently, a very small shop that went a very long way back and had a surprisingly low ceiling. Why Arthur had thought it would be something that made sense was beyond him, but it seemed that despite the terrible bike Eames had somehow made his way back to the house on with a broken arm and no sense of American road safety, he had still assumed this was something amazing that Arthur did, actually, have to see, potential near-death-experiences and all.

_This is Eames_ , he reminded himself. _What were you thinking_?

What he had been thinking was more along the lines of _thank God he didn't ask about the pills even though I offered to explain_ , mixed with a healthy remainder of guilt over the way he had managed to not tell Eames he had sorted out everyone's cover stories, but righteous indignation over what looked like a giant waste of time was a lot more comfortable.

"You brought me to see the only Hobbit hole in California?" Arthur's voice was deceptively light. Was this any better than listening to hours of Mal's fashion talk? Well, usually that didn't bother him, he had a love of well-designed clothing himself, but wedding clothes were an entirely different matter.

"It's not a Hobbit hole... it's a treasure trove," Eames swept open the door as if he were inviting Arthur into every fantasy he'd ever had.

He was right, Arthur had to admit after five minutes in the shop. The place was filled with... everything. Wedgewood and Lennox struggled for shelf space with more fanciful pieces done by local artists. There were beautiful brocade chairs, jars full of broken jewellery like the remains of Ali Baba's treasures, Gund teddy bears and clockwork banks and... well, probably everything anyone would ever want, crammed into twelve thousand square feet. 

"How are we ever going to choose?" Arthur asked after Eames waved off the proprietor of the shop. "There's too much."

"But you can't see properly unless you're overwhelmed," was all Eames said, disappearing among shelves of bric-a-brac.

"You're insane and annoying and I hate you more than Mal's mom," was all Arthur had left in him for a reply.

"Hmmmm..." was all that Eames replied, fishing a piece of stemware out from amongst its brethren. It was tall and green, but the light shining through it gave it an iridescent look, rather like dragonfly wings. "How do you feel about carnival glass?"

"Very very shiny?" Arthur asked, squinting against the colourful dazzle that Eames was sending straight into his eyes. "And by shiny I mean ow, stop."

"You're no fun," Eames said, and Arthur was incredibly glad he couldn't see the full strength of the pout that was almost certainly being turned on him.

"We just need to choose something... nice." 

He said _nice_ , but what he meant was _perfect_ , because as good as Mal and Dom had been to him, they deserved nothing less. He didn't know if his Army disability pay would stretch into the perfect range, but he was damn sure going to give it his best shot. "Something that reflects the personality of the giver and the receiver—"

Eames turned to him with a bemused expression on his face.

"—and yes, I may have allowed Mal to rook me into reading one too many bridal magazines." Arthur rolled his eyes and sighed. "What do you suggest?"

Eames blinked at him. "Something less bridal and more sane?"

"Right, so carnival glass is definitely out."

"Well, what do they _like_?" Eames sounding lost and desperate would normally have been pleasing. At this point in time it was just unhelpful. "I mean, so far as I know, Dom likes stealing things and Mal likes shooting things and fucking with our chemical makeup. And sorry, but I can't fucking think of a good wedding present that incorporates that!"

"Mal likes... well..." Arthur considered for a moment. "Things that are elegant and simple but that are not commonplace. So no Lennox, or anything that just anyone would have. And Dom? Well, I'd mostly have to say that he likes... whatever makes Mal happy. "

God, he'd just turned one of his best friends into Donna-fucking-Reed, which wasn't close to the truth at all.

"Dom likes proof," Eames said, and shrugged. 

"So does Mal, you know, _chemist_ —"

They stared at each other.

The hovering shopkeeper dived for cover as everything got turned over at a speed that would have threatened Taz.

"Here. This." Eames held out his hand. Centred neatly in the middle of his palm, Arthur saw a small metal top. It was never meant for children, at least not in the current day and age, it was too small and somehow deadly looking.

"That's... no, I'm not sure what that is, it's... yeah. What? And also, why?"

"It's a spinning top, Arthur," Eames said, managing to sound tired and look happy all at once. It was a dichotomy Arthur didn't feel like separating.

"Yes. Yes, lovely. And?"

" _Proof_." Eames said. "Arthur, look, it's proof." He cleared a little space on one of the tables, and tried to set it spinning.

He wasn't very successful, his manoeuvrability still hampered by his broken arm. 

"Here, let me." Arthur picked up the top and set it spinning in the middle of a Limoges saucer. 

"There. See?" Eames nodded as if he weren't speaking the equivalent of ancient Sumerian.

"See what?"

"Proof," Eames said, and blew on the little metal top.

It stuttered and fell, hitting the table with a small click.

"Only," Eames said, "when it's real."

"Only—?" Arthur knew he was missing something important and it was making him angry. 

_See, look, proof_ , the man had told him. _The top spins and the top falls over_... somehow that meant something. 

"When it's not real it... keeps spinning?"

"Exactly," Eames agreed.

Arthur felt lost. Eames waved his good arm about rather wildly, endangering a low-hanging crystal chandelier.

"Arthur, listen, yeah? Mal says, all the time, doesn't she. If we could find something to take into the dream. If we could —"

"Something that only happens in one place — that was _my_ idea!" 

"So it's a perfect gift." Eames was almost smiling, but he looked as though he were ready to snatch up the little top and make a run for it. "If it's your idea."

Arthur rolled his eyes, "So if the top keeps spinning... that would mean the dream is continuing, because impossibilities are endless in the dream state."

Impossibilities, not possibilities.

"Everything's possible in the dream state, darling," Eames said sadly. "Except what you know isn't going to happen."

"Right, impossibilities," Arthur said, quelling the urge to hit him.

"Right," Eames said, and turned away. "Anyway, you can get that for Mal and I'll get something... nice."

"But... you found it." Arthur looked down at the top. It looked almost forlorn there on the gold trimmed plate. Its inertia spun down with a breath of air. "I couldn't take your... idea."

"But it's yours, isn't it, you said so, it's your idea?" Eames asked lightly, and went back to turning the shelves upside down.

Arthur stared at the little metal top.

_If there were something that does not change in reality, or_ only _changes in reality, something one could rely upon — that would of course work._

His idea, or Mal's?

He spun the top.

And Eames, from behind him, blew on it once more.

And it fell.

"Um... thanks..." Arthur said, but it felt uncomfortable, as if bestowing this personal a gift as a wedding present were wrong somehow. "Don't you think it should come from both of us though?"

As much as he liked the top and felt it was the perfect gift for Mal, a part of him still called for something more traditional.

Eames laughed. "I'm not sure whether Mal or Dom would hate that more," he said. "No. Your idea, your gift. Me? I'm going for something gorgeous, brilliant, and completely useless."

"You're buying them a genius supermodel?" Arthur quipped, picking up the top at last and looking at it more closely.

"Didn't they all get married?" Eames asked absently.

"Huh?"

"What?"

"The supermodels —"

"Well I bet you could still —"

"Mal would kill me."

"Not if you hired two," Arthur said dryly. "One for each."

He'd never seen anyone choke on their own breath before.

Still, choking aside, they managed to finish up their scavenging a short time later. In addition to the top, Arthur purchased a small Lalique crystal box to hold it. Beauty and functionality — Arthur felt quite satisfied.

He was almost afraid to ask what Eames wound up with.

Eames refused to tell him until the morning of the wedding, and when he did, it was just before Mal opened it, Mal beautiful as ever in a ratty old robe that was soaking up her newest hair-tint around its collar (because for some reason the lightened streaks at the front need to be some half-a shade darker, or redder, or bright pink, or something Arthur had stopped listening to because he really didn't care) and then Eames was so blatant in not paying attention that Arthur _knew_.

"Dom, look!"

And the music box played, tinny and faraway, and the tiny figures danced in the centre of a succession of gilded mirrors of foil and glass; endless projections, infinite possibilities, an unending world made for two crafted simulacrums.

_Non, je ne regrette rien..._

**

**Dom, then**

At first they had planned to take a trip — Hawaii, the Virgin Islands, or some other typical honeymoon spot — but then Mal pointed out that they already lived by the ocean so none of those places were any better than home. Eames had, of course, suggested Cornwall. Still on the ocean, but far different from most resort towns. Then Arthur, just as insistently, had put forth Italy as warm, idyllic and beautiful. Eames had countered with Rio de Janeiro. Then Arthur suggested Berlin.

"Berlin?" Eames scoffed. "They're honeymooning, not going on leave, Arthur."

Then Arthur scowled and Mal fussed and in the end they did the only thing possible. 

They stayed right where they were.

"It doesn't matter if we go or if we stay, darling," she had said. "We had the perfect wedding and now we can just get on with having the perfect life. And our life is here."

Dom was never going to see the world the way Mal did, but it didn't mean he couldn't agree with her vision. If she thought that what they had — their weird, ramshackle, far-too-many-people infested house, with a shotgun hole in the ceiling, a military refugee in the spare room, and a con-man in what had used to be a second study — was perfect, then who was he to deny her?

He got on with designing mazes, with erasing and rebuilding Arthur's dream security from scratch, with learning that the important thing with Eames was not to trust him, but to be _trusted_ , with feeding Mal's inspiration as well as her love for him.

It was a strange life, to be sure, and not one that he himself would ever have thought of as perfect before he had it, but now that it was his — well.

Perfect didn't seem so far from the truth, most days.

There were so many strange, small joys, in and out of dreamsharing. Discovering that Mal had an unerring aim with throwing knives (that had not especially pleased Arthur, unfortunate recipient of one zipping past his ear one evening to kill a persistent cricket, but it had thrilled everyone else). The fact that unlike everything else, forging could be based on memories and living images. Arthur devising a rose-maze that got everyone hopelessly lost, and proving that a lack of imagination could be an astounding asset. Dom's projections turning out to have a bent for assassination (something _no-one_ except Mal enjoyed, but her delight made it worthwhile — for him).

"Not so much perfection as delight," Mal said one night, stretching out in bed.

"Delight?" Dom asked. "I'm not sure I see it... aside from this."

He leaned down, kissing the breast that was closest to him. "This is always delightful."

"Thank you, darling," Mal giggled. "But I actually meant everything else. We have friends and amusements and interesting work. What could be more delightful?"

"This." Another kiss.

"But of course," Mal said, and pulled him closer.

_You're my perfection. You're my delight._

He told her that again and again, that night and on many nights to come, and he never stopped meaning it.

Later, he was always glad that it never occurred to him not to say it aloud, that in no lifetime, not the one they lived out, growing old in their love as they had always intended; nor the one ripped from him by that same coast of limbo, that held no secrets to be read in its rockpools, but only the horizon between madness and sanity — in no lifetime, real or created, did he ever stop telling her with his voice and his mind and his body, that she was all he could possibly dream of.

**

**Arthur, then**

This was, Arthur well knew, what came from being far too good at what he did. Arthur had always been taught that anything worth doing was worth doing well, but somehow he didn't think that this was what his father had meant. He knew how to temporarily disable a man in at least sixty-five ways without causing him any permanent damage. Why he hadn't used one of them the night that Dom brought Eames home, he still didn't know.

He should have. He wished he had. 

And more than that, he was sorry that Eames would now have to pay for that mistake.

"What did the doctor say about Eames's hand, Arthur?" Dom had asked when he and Eames had returned from Eames's appointment. 

Arthur couldn't bring himself to answer, just waved him off with some comment and went straight out the back door and down to the beach.

It would have helped if Eames had been annoyed by the news of tendon damage. It would have helped incredibly if he'd shouted. Or punched Arthur in the face. Or walked out, which would have got Dom to punch him in the face.

Something that was remotely approaching blame, anyway.

But he'd done none of those things, just shrugged it off as something else to work around, and started looking through the paperwork on rehab he'd been given, and Arthur felt worse than any well-aimed blow could have managed.

Although they never talked about it directly, Arthur knew that Eames was a thief, a forger, and that manual dexterity was a huge percentage of what made this livelihood viable. How could he take this news so calmly? That would be like telling Arthur that they'd have to chop off all but two of his fingers or remove part of his brain. How can Eames act like it was no big deal? More importantly, how could he not blame Arthur for doing this to him?

Distance and the sound of the ocean waves drowned out any conversation from the house, for which Arthur was very grateful. Maybe if he stayed down here long enough, they'd forget about him altogether until he figured out, somehow, a way to make this up to Eames.

Or maybe he'd just stay here until the salt spray calcified his skin and he wound up looking like part of the cliffs... because he was pretty sure that both objectives would take about the same amount of time.

"You are a complete idiot," Mal said from behind him, and maybe he was going to get hit after all. Or possibly shot and left to drift out to sea, it was fairly even odds with Mal and her idea of a suitable response.

"I know," was all he could come up with.

"You are a complete idiot because you think this is all your fault. It is not. It is also Dom's fault for not using his phone. It is my fault for overreacting and triggering you into violence. It is Eames's fault for being who he is and letting Dom charm him. The difference is, we know that, and you, it would seem, do not. And therefore you are not only an idiot, but a very arrogant idiot."

"You can play word games all day, Mal, but the actual result will still be the same. I'm the one who broke Eames's arm and damaged his nerves. I'm the one who chose what tactic to employ, how much force to use, and I knew, reasonably what damage it could cause." Arthur glanced back at her. "Now tell me how that is not my fault?"

"It would be your fault if he had been what you had thought him, and you had pulled back," Mal shrugged, elegantly dismissive. "And then you would be dead and so would I, and I think I would blame you a great deal, were that the case."

"But —" Arthur started, and then remembered something else that had happened that night, remembered Eames saying to him 'What if's a losing game, so don't play it.'

From the time Dom and Eames had got out of the car, there could have been no good outcome. There were a thousand what ifs, and no good outcome, and perhaps this was the best of them all, because no-one was dead and they still had the PASIV.

Mal waited, eyebrows raised.

"Communal screw-up," Arthur accepted.

"Yes," Mal said serenely.

"Still sucks," Arthur sighed. 

"Magnificently," Mal agreed, taking his hand and drawing him back toward the house. 

When they arrived, they could hear Dom in the kitchen, opening and closing drawers and cabinets. Eames was on the living room couch, his papers spread across the coffee table as he studied them, occasionally lifting his right hand and turning it this way and that.

"Why are the spoons in the freezer?" Dom asked helplessly of no-one in particular, and Eames snorted.

"Because you put them there, Dom, despite being asked not to about six times."

"Okay, why did I put the spoons in the freezer?"

"Good question, and I'd love to know the answer," Eames said peacefully, and Dom snarled in frustration.

Mal laughed silently, hand over her mouth. Arthur thought she had a pretty good idea what Dom had been thinking, or if he had been thinking at all, but she obviously wasn't in any mood to share.

Eames looked up at their return, "Ah, Arthur, how was the beach this afternoon? I would have thought it a bit chilly for sun bathing but you Yanks get odd ideas in your head."

"At least we have sun here," Arthur gave a small smile. Apparently they were just going to play this off like nothing. Okay... he could do that. He waved a hand at the instruction sheets. "Do you need help with any of that?"

"Rather good question," Eames said, picking up one sheet and peering at it. "Supposedly 'manipulating small intricate items will help build stamina and flexibility', but since Dom refuses to allow me to take apart his television, he's in the kitchen looking for something for me to use."

"And he's looking in the freezer?"

"Apparently."

"But why —" Arthur, unwisely, met Eames's equally bewildered look with his own confusion, and started to laugh. "Okay, you know that he's side-tracked by now, don't you?"

"I do indeed," Eames said solemnly. "And considering what he's come up with so far, I'm glad of it."

"Darling Dom, you cannot do anything with a cheesegrater," Mal said in a kind of squeak, and Eames choked on a snort of laughter.

"Oh Christ, let's get out of here," he wheezed.

"Yes, please..." Arthur grabbed his keys and headed for the door. "Where to?"

Eames snatched the keys out of Arthur's hand, "Pub? Uh... bar, I mean."

"Works for me."

It didn't really, not quite, because he was still caught up in the losing game of what ifs, and he thought he would be for some time — but there were other things that were more immediate, there was Dom and cheesegraters and Mal laughing and reasons to escape and ways of accomplishing just that.

And maybe, if he kept dealing with what was rather than what might have been or should be, the sense of failure would recede, stop hurting, close over from its rawness and merge into the pattern of his life.

He couldn't change what had been done.

But if nothing else, he could accept he couldn't undo it.

**

**Dom, then**

Dom woke out of a sound sleep to the sound of the world caving in. Or possibly it was just the front door.

*boom*

"Shhhhh..."

*thud*

"You need to turn that upside-right."

*scrape... scrape... clack... scrape*

"I think it's broken. What now?"

*bing-bong... bing-bong... bing-bong*

"Dom... the children are home."

"I'm going to sell them to a circus," Dom said blearily. 

"They might have too much fun." Mal sounded far too awake. "And what has the circus ever done to you?"

"It would travel. A long way away. To somewhere I'm not." Dom pulled the covers over his head, distantly registering that whatever was going 'bing-bong' was showing absolutely no signs of stopping. "Oh my God, what are they doing?"

"I think they have broken something." Mal was outright giggling.

"Yeah, my patience," Dom agreed.

The ringing of the doorbell was now accompanied by knocking and possibly kicking... then a crash... then silence.

"Mal is so going to kill you. She loves that... thing..."

"Then she shouldn't have left it so close to the door."

"GOD!" Dom yelled at the ceiling, in a most impious mood. He jumped up, tugged on his robe and stomped toward the front door.

"Tell them they are fixing it, whatever it is," Mal said, curling back up under the coverlet. "But not tonight, please."

In some world that Dom didn't have to live in, that probably sounded perfectly reasonable. In a world where Mal was showing every signs of going back to sleep, and someone had started singing very loudly on his front lawn, not so much.

"Jeremiah Jones, a ladies' man was he,  
Every pretty girl he loved to spoooooooon.  
Still he found a wife along beside the sea,  
Went to Margate for the honeymoooooooon.  
But when he strolled along the promenade..."

"I thought promenade was that stuff you can put in your hair?"

"No, darling, that's pomade."

"Oh."

"But when he strolled along the promenade  
with his little wife just newly wed —"

"Eames! Is there a reason you are trying to wake all my neighbours with that caterwauling?" Dom groaned as he opened the door.

"I thought it was nice."

"Thank you, Arthur."

"Oh God," Dom groaned again. "Just — get inside. And stop singing. Forever."

"But it's fun," Eames said, peering into his face with all the earnestness of the completely trashed. "Don't you like fun?"

"No," Dom lied. "Hate it. Can you both, please, please, for the love of God, just go to bed?" 

Arthur started to laugh. Eames looked speculative.

"Never mind," Dom sighed. He wondered if he could get away with what would doubtless be a fair degree of alcoholic amnesia the next day, and send them both to their rooms. Separately, oh God, separately. "Wait," he said then, a horrible thought occurring to him. "Wait, how did you get back here? Eames, for fuck's safe tell me you didn't drive —"

"I did not drive," Eames said, solemnly and obligingly, and ruined Dom's moment of blissful relief by explaining, "Arthur drove."

Arthur beamed at Eames, "I did. And kept it right down the middle the whole way."

Dom fervently hoped that this meant he kept the car in the middle of the correct lane and not the road's dividing line down the middle of the car. Either way, he decided, they were home now, the car looked to be in one piece, and he'd let it drop until the morning as long as the police did not show up on his doorstep.

He managed to herd them into the living room with very little trouble, but when he returned from closing the door, he found Eames splayed out on the couch with Arthur using his hip for a pillow. 

"Oh, come on now. You don't want to sleep there. You'll both be very unhappy in the morning."

Eames idly ran one hand through Arthur's hair, making it stand up in odd spikes, "Come on, darling, Dom's right. Off to bed."

"Comf'erble." Arthur snickered against Eames's trousers, rubbing his face on the nap like a cat. A very large drunken cat.

Eames shot Dom a surprisingly sober and mildly panicked look, and Dom sighed for what felt like the millionth time that night.

"Arthur, for your own sake, I suggest you forget about tonight as quickly as possible," he said, and geared himself up to deal with the task of getting Arthur off the floor and down the hallway to his room.

It was amazing how drunk people gained three times their body weight when they were both most of the way to being asleep, and feeling unco-operative about moving at all.

Grumbling the whole way, Arthur got to his feet and draped himself limply, over Dom. "Jus' like morning," he said, and began to giggle and sing, "G'd mornin', g'd mornin', we talk'd the whole night through..."

"Arthur. Shhh..."

"Oh... Mal's sleepin... Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh," Arthur breathed horrible, I-have-sampled-everything-on the-top-shelf fumes into Dom's face. "Quiet."

"That'd be nice," Dom agreed, trying not to laugh himself at how surreal this whole thing was. Eames had closed his eyes and was apparently quite happy to spend the night on the couch, and Dom was not doing this twice in one night, so he would just have to deal with any aches and pains himself.

He got Arthur into his room, and closed the door firmly on him, ignoring the muddled surprise on his face — and the series of ensuing bangs that suggested several things were being knocked over, from behind the closed door.

"Nicely done," Eames said quietly behind him, and Dom just about managed not to scream.

"For fuck's sake," he gasped instead. "I thought you were passed out!"

"I'm not as think as you drunk I am," Eames said, snickered, and ambled off to (thank God) his own room.

Dom closed his mouth, took several deep breaths, decided he didn't want to know, and went back to bed.

**

**Arthur, then**

Arthur's pillow was fighting with him. First it had insisted that it needed to go under his shoulders, leaving his head hanging down and back at an uncomfortable angle. He had managed to correct that problem but now the cursed thing had simply jumped off the bed and was laying there and, he was sure, laughing at him. 

And where was Eames during all this? The man was supposed to have his back, wasn't he? Handn't they talked about that very thing, somewhere around his forth... or maybe his fifth drink? Eames was supposed to watch his back and make sure he didn't do anything too stupid while he was innee... er... inerber... hmmm... drunk. And in turn, Arthur would do the same.

He stared at the pillow and decided that his best bet was to track down Eames and remind him that dealing with sentient laughing pillows was the very foundations of such an agreement.

He was about to knock — repeatedly — on Eames's door and enforce that point of view, when his brain decided to catch up with his ears and recognise the fact that there were voices coming from behind the layers of plywood.

"Oh my darling," Mal said, clear and soft and in tones that would have cut through concrete. "Oh lovely boy, you did your best."

"I did try. I did try, Mal, I do, but —"

"Shh shh shh now, lie still, anger won't help."

"It can't help less!"

It was Eames and Mal. Talking. In Eames's bedroom.

Arthur blinked. There was something intrinsically wrong in that statement but he was definitely not sober enough to figure it out. Instead he just stood in the hallway, his eyes shifting between the closed door in front of him, and his own open door behind him. He could see his pillow peeking around the edge of it, taunting him.

"Fuck, Mal..." He heard Eames groan, his voice deep and rough. "Is it supposed to feel like that?"

"I don't know if it's supposed to. But it does. It does. And it would not be like this at all, but your heart —"

"I don't have a heart!"

"You do. Oh cheri, you do. Or you would not have endured this. I am so sorry." Mal's voice became suddenly muffled. "Oh I am so sorry, we have made this —"

"No, Mal-love, no, I came here —"

"We made it easy."

"You did make it easy," Eames said, and his voice cracked. "Darling, I never knew, this fucking liability of a situation, I never even thought, or I wouldn't have stayed."

"Don't leave because this makes it hard," Mal said in the same muffled voice. "I need you, Dom needs you, don't leave. Please don't leave."

"Not goin' nowhere," Eames said, and then there were strange choked sounds, and they must have been kissing, touching, making one another cry out, because what else could make that strange silence, broken only by those odd muffled noises?

Arthur, breaking his heart for Dom's innocence, went back to his room and his pillow, and eventually, fell asleep.

**

**Eames, then**

Really, next time Eames was going to make sure that Arthur stuck to beer. It would be cheaper and the bloke would probably get just as drunk. 

Eames stretched out in the bed, scratching his belly as he woke up. His head didn't ache much, just a slight afterburn, but his mouth tasted like... well, rather like someone had installed old, tacky, brown shag carpet on his tongue. 

It really wasn't very pleasant.

He sat up and rubbed his hands over his face. Maybe if he hurried he could get into and out of the shower, and be dressed and fortified with some strong tea before Arthur even woke up. Somehow, even though their evening had been good — a right laugh, if he were being honest — it also made him feel a bit odd.

Thank God for Cobb, and that, if you liked, was a phrase he'd never thought he'd be saying, particularly when the sun was just up and he'd deliberately gone binge-drinking.

Or rather, making sure Arthur went binge-drinking.

It wasn't as though he could have got rid of all the drinks he was supposed to have downed, was it?

But Arthur —

Well, Mal had got it, he knew that much. Darling Mal, always so ready to give chapter and verse with the worst of intentions, as long as they kept working. Eames could respect that, even if he didn't particularly respect her methods.

Fucking military, landing responsibility on people who didn't know how to deal with it.

Arthur was too young. Okay, Arthur was only about four or five years younger than he was, but he was pretty damn sure that his upbringing was a lot more sheltered... which made the age gap more like ten. And that meant... fuck, way too many years.

He pulled his brain forcibly back from sadly contemplating the differences between himself and Arthur, back to the practical — shower, shave, tea.

He got up, pulled his trousers on, grabbed some clean clothes and headed down the hallway.

He showered, and went to the kitchen, and the usual rigmarole began.

Dom leant on him, Mal removed Dom, and Arthur wasn't there.

Eames waved a hand in silent demand for an explanation.

"You came in at three, cheri," Mal said kindly, pushing more coffee at Dom.

"Hate you," Dom mumbled to the table.

"Ah," Eames said in non-coherent understanding.

They had come in at three... and Dom was tired and even more zombie-like than usual and Mal was being kind, and... 

No, it still didn't make sense, but it didn't matter. He would have tea and Mal would probably feed him, and Arthur would come in, kill his hangover with strong coffee and aspirin and then the day would continue as per usual.

Except Mal gave him funny meaningful looks that he didn't understand the meaning of, and then Arthur came through the kitchen and went straight out for a run, which if he felt as awful as he legitimately must, made no sense.

And then Dom looked up, all bleary-eyed, and said "Oh, Eames. Oh, man, no, Mal said, I'm so fucking sorry," and came round the table and hugged him, sleepy and warm and leaning too hard, blinking against his neck and rubbing his shoulders.

"Dom?"

"We'll fix it," Dom said firmly, and hugged him a bit more, and —

"You know what, bruv, I think it's gone beyond that," Eames said, and didn't know how unhappy he was until the words left his mouth, and Dom was practically wrapped around him, cuddling him like he was a child. Ridiculous, too-tactile Dom, who somehow never made being touched into a claustrophobic hell.

And right now, he needed that comfort more than he could say.

**

**Arthur, then**

_God damn Eames. God damn Mal. How could she? How could they? And Dom... What could he do with that?_

Arthur's head pounded with the rhythm of his running feet. He felt horrible, but it wasn't just the pain of his hangover that was running through his head. 

_Too many thoughts. Too many God damned thoughts._

He had thought that he and Eames were growing closer, that they—

No, that was a thought that he refused to have. This was all so fucked up that he was doing the only thing he knew how to do. He was running. Not running away, just running. It was something he did when he needed to think. He'd started when he was eleven or twelve — his family had moved to California from Illinois — and there had been too many changes in his life. Running had been an escape then, from school bullies and from his own awkwardness in a body that was growing taller but no more graceful than he had been at ten. 

Later, the running had become a way to focus. He had gotten faster, gained stamina and coordination, and by the time he graduated from school and joined the Army he had become lean and wiry — his focus never better.

He seemed to excel in everything he attempted after that. He went through all his training and was moving along at a steady pace of promotion and commendation when he got moved into the Rangers. That was where he got tapped to be part of the Dream Share project.

It was a great honor to be chosen, because if "Rangers lead the way" then those who were invited to be the first to lead a new endeavor had to be the elite of the elite... or so he was told. And yes, the project had started out that way, Arthur and the thirty other Rangers that had been chosen, set to lead the way in just one more scenario — to gain enemy intelligence direct from the source, the mind of the enemy soldiers.

Unfortunately very few of his fellow rangers had the... capacity... for dreaming. They were far too grounded in reality, far too steadfast and unbending. In the end only three out of the original thirty remained. Arthur, for all his adherence to rules and regulations, somehow also had enough creativity to create and adapt. 

And Arthur was the one that Mal chose to work with, although he never did know why.

Even after the cock-up that had sent Arthur to a psych-ward for two months and had him laden down with therapists he couldn't talk to and bottles of tablets that he wouldn't take, Mal had stuck by him. When the army had tried to toss him aside as useless, Mal had used her connections to make certain that his discharge was not simply general, but with honor. She was the one who had sat up with him those first few nights after he had been released, feeding him coffee and soup and wrapping him in a veritable cocoon of warmth and caring. It was something that he would never forget.

But how could he forget what he'd heard last night?

God damn it.

He turned back toward the house, his thoughts no more settled than they had been when he left. He still didn't know what he was going to do. Should he tell Dom? Or— _fuck!_ Maybe Dom knew. He had always been indulgent of whatever Mal wanted. Would that indulgence stretch to allowing her a lover?

And the drum of his feet on the road answered what he already knew.

_Yes._

_Yes._

_Yes._

Because Dom would give Mal anything she wanted, anything he thought she wanted, anything she didn't know she wanted.

So if she wanted a lover?

_Yes._

Dom wouldn't even turn a hair.

**

By the time Arthur reached the house and made his way around the side to the kitchen door he wasn't sure what part of him was more tired, his body or his mind. His shirt was soaked through with sweat despite the cool morning breeze and he was sure that his heart and his head were both pounding in an off-rhythm just to annoy him. He grabbed a towel off the washing machine as he passed it and wiped at his face.

Arthur was relieved that the kitchen was empty — with the exception of Dom, his head down over the morning news, coffee cup clutched in his hand like a life-line. Maybe his luck would hold and he could just trot through to the bathroom, grab a shower and then crash until he felt able to convince himself that none of the previous night had happened.

"Hey," Dom said, looking up from the paper. "So, do you feel like telling me what happened between my looking at inexplicable freezer-spoons yesterday and you getting home at three in the morning blitzed as fuck to make Eames look like he's going to be next up needing me to lock security into his brain? Because seriously, one of you on the verge of going off the deep end every time I turn my back is a bit more than I can take."

Or not, because apparently Dom wasn't going to let him, and apparently Dom really didn't know about Mal and Eames, and oh, _fuck_.

That left him in the position of wondering exactly which would make him the worse friend, which would have Dom hating him the most, knowing and telling or knowing and not telling.

Fuck.

This was exactly the kind of dilemma that he was supposed to be avoiding. The kind of thing that had kept him from speaking out about the things that had happened to him in the dreamscape — the cognitive dissonance between duty and honour, between friendship and truth. Arthur was glad there were no mirrors in the kitchen to reflect back the expression on his face, he probably looked just as insane as the doctors had declared him before ordering his release from the army.

"It's nothing, Dom... I... I'm hungover, okay. Just leave it."

Dom gave him an exasperated look. "Yeah, I'm known for that."

"Well —" Arthur began, hopeless deflection on the tip of his tongue, and Dom glared at him with surprising effect.

"When I've had coffee?" he clarified with a mildness very much at odds with his expression, which was more like the one Arthur tended to see while Dom worked his security magic on Arthur's tattered mental defences, down in the dreamscape.

"No," Arthur admitted. "Okay, not after two cups of coffee —"

Dom pointed meaningfully to the refilling pot.

"Yeah," Arthur said, conceding.

"So?"

"After I went to bed —"

"Interesting choice of words," Dom said with a smirk.

"Eames. And Mal." And that was as far as Arthur was prepared to go without a crowbar of some variety, and possibly it would _have_ to be physical, because he could feel his vocal cords and his brain join in on clamping down anything else he might have said.

Dom's glare of Premonitory Doom faded out into a sort of cringe.

"Yeah. I know. Mal never learned what the phrase 'good place to stop' really means."

Arthur choked on air. " _What_?"

Dom stared at him. "What?"

There was a moment of mutual confusion, and then Arthur said, very carefully, "Dom, what are you talking about?"

"The same thing you are — Eames and Mal." Dom's forehead wrinkled in a frown, "Aren't I?"

There was silence filled only with the gurgling hiss of the coffee maker completing its job and a low murmur of voices from the living room. "Um... possibly?"

"Mal just kept poking at him until he said yes." Dom carried his cup over to refill it. "It's one of her talents, you know? Irresistible force."

"Oh God," said Arthur, wishing Dom would just shut up before his mind's eye was irreparably scarred. "Um..."

"And of course she figured 'hey, easier when he's drunk', because delightful though her mind is, its logic isn't one I can follow —"

"Augh," said Arthur coherently.

" — still, I don't think she had it in mind to, you know, hurt him —"

" _Oh my God will you please shut up —!_ "

"—but for all her talents she's simply never going to be a therapist of any kind — are you okay?"

"No..." Arthur choked out. "I'm hungover and worn out... and I think I just swallowed my tongue. Really, Dominic, don't you care?"

"That you swallowed your tongue?"

"No!!"

"What the fuck is the problem?"

There was a groan from the living room, creaking noise that could only be the couch and then some soft words of encouragement.

"What is—?" There was another groan, louder this time. "That! That is my problem." Arthur waved (well, flailed, really) his hand in the direction of the living room.

"Well it's not like he didn't say she could carry on, even after last night —"

"Have you _all lost your minds_?"

"Probably," Dom said warily, "but I still don't know why you're so upset."

"She's your wife! Didn't you say something about —" Actually, he couldn't remember whether they _had_ promised each other fidelity, but wasn't it sort of implicit? "And I mean they're right there!"

"How the fuck does Mal being my wife have anything to do with the fact she's a fucking awful physiotherapist and Eames is a demented British idiot who likes trying out new pain thresholds?" Dom's voice was verging into the territory of shrieking. It was a fairly unpleasant sound.

"What —"

"Er, Arthur," Dom said, and damn the bastard, he was starting to laugh, Arthur knew it. "I know what I'm talking about. Um..." he put his hand over his mouth, not quickly enough to hide the shit-eating grin that was taking over his face. "What were _you_ talking about? And can I please, please have details?"

Arthur found himself suddenly sitting down, rather like a deflated balloon, collapsing in on himself. "I... God... I don't know, Dom."

A loud cackle escaped from behind Dom's hand, "Really, Arthur, maybe you're the one who should be jealous. Or is jealous..."

Arthur groaned loudly, laying his head down on the table and covering it with his hands. "Just don't, okay? You're all going to give me a relapse or an episode or... or something that's going to leave me locked in a room with pillows on the wall... sentient pillows that laugh at me."

"Firstly, you'd so deserve that, and secondly, my security is way better than potential relapses," Dom said, his voice shaking with what Arthur was bitterly aware was most likely an incipient giggle fit. "But sentient pillows I can work with."

Arthur lifted his head. "Don't you dare," he said, well aware that he came off as being about as threatening as a damp sparrow.

Dom smiled at him, incredibly unreassuringly, and then called through, "Hey, Eames!"

"Fuck off, Dom!"

"Sentient pillows!"

"Fuck _off_!"

"It's Arthur's idea..."

"Oh well, nothing ever goes wrong with those," Eames said with more sarcasm than Arthur thought was really merited, "so great, yeah, do that — and Arthur, darling, are they going to be like the crab, and can they kill Mal too, not just Dom?"

" _Yes_ ," said Arthur venomously.

"Fantastic," said Eames, and then "Mal, STOP doing that."

Arthur stomped out to the living room then toward the hallway, "You're all hopeless. I'm going for a shower, and with any luck you'll all have fucked off by the time I get back."

"Dominic, you've hurt Arthur's feelings," Mal scolded, bending Eames's fingers back in a slow, gentle flex. 

"Arthur! Don't leave me..." Eames snarled, trying to jerk his hand away, "Dammit, Mallorie! That hurts!"

"My wife, the Mistress of Pain." Dom chortled.

" _All_ have fucked off," Arthur repeated with emphasis.

It wasn't until he was halfway through his shower that he realized he was laughing just as hard as Dom had been, and was thoroughly grateful for the fact that the shower door and the water would block out any sound.

Laughing to himself from insane relief wasn't exactly something that would reassure Dom as to his sanity, after all.

**

**Dom, now**

"These are the best pancakes ever!" James announced, shoving another bite into his mouth, because of course, after eating decidedly off guacamole, throwing up all over two beds and spending the rest of the night sticking his toes into Dom's kidneys, he now felt perfectly fine. "Can I have some more?"

"James, swallow before you speak," Dom said for probably the fifth time since breakfast had started.

"You already had four," Philippa complained. "Leave some for the rest of us."

"There is plenty of batter," Saito said calmly, "but perhaps, James, it would be best if you stop now. I am certain that you do not wish to repeat your... experiences of last evening."

No-one else did, certainly, Dom thought with a stifled laugh.

"May I have one more, dad?" Philippa made puppy eyes at Dom until he slid the pancake on his plate off onto hers. "These really are good, Mr. Saito. I wish you lived here with us. Then we could have pancakes every morning!"

"You are assuming that were I to live here, I would be devoting my entire existence to your whims," Saito said quellingly.

"Yep!" Philippa said cheerfully. Dom snorted.

"And that would be why no-one ever _does_ want to live here with us, Pip," he pointed out. Using sarcastic logic on small children might be a low form of entertainment, but it was how he got through most of his days.

"People mostly do so want," said Philippa with her own incontrovertible brand of logic. "Even when they go back to France and _don't say goodbye_." The last came out with a definite pout.

"They're going to France to — they've gone to France to — well, there's Ari's coffee, and —" Dom gave up. "We're all going to France soon to see them, so it doesn't matter," he finished, in what really wasn't his finest moment of linear argument, but seemed to satisfy Philippa, at least for the moment.

"Yay, Ari is a good twat," James said happily, and Dom was treated to the rare and delightful spectacle of Saito snorting tea out through his nose.

**

**Eames, then**

"Hey... we'll work on it. You just have to get in the Zen," Arthur bumped his shoulder against Eames's as they walked out of the shooting range.

"My targeting is fine, Arthur," Eames said, amused despite himself. He really didn't need consolation for what Arthur supposed were his inadequacies — as long as he could make kill-shots, the rest was pretty irrelevant, as far as he was concerned. And the underground garage had more than proved his abilities on that score. "Anyway, I don't need to be able to put a bullet into a flea's arse. That's what I have you for."

Arthur snorted, pulling out his keys and unlocking the trunk of the car. They had been at the range for a couple of hours, joking around, going through several dozen targets each and hundreds of rounds of ammo. It still amazed Eames that the military could dismiss Arthur, declare him crazy, but no one thought of taking away his weapons. 

_Bloody Americans..._

Of course, it was entirely possible that they _had_ taken away Arthur's weapons and then Arthur had simply laid his hands on more. Eames really didn't think either option was completely out of the question.

"Keys," he said instead of pursuing that line of thought, just to make Arthur glare at him and cross his arms as though that was any sort of defence. "Arthur. Public roads. You and speed limits. The nice little agreement you have. Keys."

"Fine," Arthur grumbled, putting their weaponry into the trunk, and then handed Eames the keys. "This isn't always going to work, you know?"

Eames just smirked, and climbed behind the steering wheel. It still seemed roundabout and backwards to be sitting on the left side of the car, but the small victory after his defeat on the range made it all worthwhile.

"Straight home or someplace else?"

"It's hot. How about a swim? Mal and Dom are going to be gone until Tuesday anyway so we have a work free weekend." Arthur stretched in the passenger seat. "I could teach you to body surf..."

"Pass..."

Arthur sighed. "You already know how, don't you?" It wasn't as exasperated as it might have been.

"Possibly," Eames agreed blandly, starting the car.

Arthur sighed, put-upon to the nth degree, and then shook his head. "Someday, you're going to have to give me a list, you know."

"Of all my good qualities? Arthur, you wound me. My accomplishments couldn't fit on a list, never mind my good qualities."

"Oh, so like your many, many irritating qualities, then."

"Yep," Eames said cheerfully.

It was odd, Eames thought, the more he and Arthur snarked at each other, the happier they were in each other's company. It wasn't that there was no pretence between them, it was that the pretence seemed more like a window than a wall. Mal was lovely, coddling and berating them equally. Dom was his brother — the old affectionate appellations of his less reputable days — _bruv,_ he called Dom when the other man was at his most adamant, his most consoling; _mate_ , when it was Dom who needed bolstering — had escaped him more than once. They were people he knew he could trust (odd enough for him), but Arthur... fuck... he didn't even know what Arthur was to him yet. He wanted to find out, but was terrified of the idea at the same time.

They arrived home, and climbed out of the car.

"We can leave the stuff in the trunk until later. I'll clean it all after dinner." Arthur moved towards the back of the house, tugging off his shirt. "Hey... last one to the beach has to cook."

And of course, he broke into a run, leaving Eames standing for a solid three seconds before he went into action.

"You're so going to lose, Eames!" Arthur shouted as he dashed for the beach steps.

"Not if I can help it." Eames shouted back... and ran, forgoing the steps to dive right off the side of the hill.

"You fucking _lunatic_!" Arthur yelled, catching up with him too late to win the cooking bet. "What the hell were you —" And then he took in Eames's wholly undamaged appearance, and cut himself off mid-rant. "Show me," he said gleefully.

Eames grinned at him. "My pleasure," he said.

He was pretty sure it would be, too.

They spent the entire weekend leaping from things as Eames taught Arthur the basics of parkour — utilizing the roof, the hillside, the top of the car — vaulting and tumbling until they were too exhausted to do more than lie in the grass and laugh at each other.

That was where Mal and Dom found them when Tuesday rolled around, in the middle of the back yard, both sprawled out in exhausted victory on the rather scrubby patch of lawn that would one day be a garden, smiling in their sleep.

Mal gloated for _hours'_ worth of blood-drawing, samples, and chemical charts over the fact that exercise apparently caused natural dreaming to start re-emerging, Dom made vague and strangely pointed remarks about relaxation, and Arthur returned to his usual nicely-homicidal state of being before the day was out.

Eames, to his own surprise, rather regretted that.

**

**Dom, now**

Dom had sent the kids off to do their morning chores — get dressed, brush their teeth — normally the routine would include making their beds but with James's late night regurgitation extravaganza that would have to wait until Dom could help them.

"I hope the kids aren't overwhelming you," Dom shook his head as he carried the last of the plates into the kitchen. "They can be a bit... trying."

"I find your children to be... most delightful," Saito professed. 

"Okay..." Dom allowed, "delightfully trying then."

A small smile played around the edges of Saito's lips.

"And they're very distracting," Dom continued. "I meant to ask why you're even here? I'm sure it's not just to make pancakes."

"I came for a party." Saito was as imperturbable as always. "I stayed for the coffee." He almost smiled. "Though not in the way one usually means that."

"You were managing Eames, before that." Dom didn't mean to sound quite as censorious as he did, but it was hard not to remember, sometimes, hard — _impossible_ his mind whispered — not to superimpose the images of the past onto what he had regained in the present. The first time he had met Eames, the man had written on water for him, and later killed for him (he could have left me there, Dom always thought, he could have taken the PASIV and left me there, and no-one would have been the wiser), he had worked with them through Mal's impromptu turn as a physiotherapist and Arthur disappearing into the dreamscape to rebuild his military-broken defences; through Dom's development of a wholly new skill — _extraction_ , though hardly anyone called it that back then — and Dom could no more forget those days than he could forget the woman who had been at the centre of them.

It might have been Mal who had broken Eames, but it was Dom who was left alive to carry the blame of her actions. The other half of his heart, of his soul, of his mind — how could he not take on alone what should have been hers to carry with his help?

Part of him would always flinch away, as it did from thoughts of Miles and what he had done to them all, from knowing that one of those he had so briefly and so delightedly called his family was being forced again into actions that were just far enough from their own volition to verge on coercion.

"I was managing them all," Saito said without a trace of apology. "Someone had to. Left alone, it would have fallen to you. That would have been unfair."

"And it was you they called for help, anyway." That was the part Dom, weirdly, _didn't_ mind. It had actually been a relief, once he had heard Arthur's summary of the entire Paris debacle of melted and water-logged and haunted flats, rejected kisses and broken noses and Ariadne's turn as a matchmaking harpy, _not_ to have been involved from the outset.

"It was," Saito admitted. "I really do owe them more than money, you know? We have become... friends."

He said it almost as if it were a question and the tone made a slight frown shift over Dom's face. "Of course you have. They wouldn't have bothered to call if you weren't."

Saito nodded and started rinsing off the breakfast dishes.

"No... stop." Dom turned off the taps. "You cooked, I clean up."

"I do not mind."

"Nope, that's how it works with friends," Dom's lip twitched. "It's all fair trade with no money involved."

"Ah." Saito took a step back from the sink, holding up his hands. "I concede."

Dom managed, somehow, not to roll his eyes. "Yeah, your concessions are amazing," he agreed. "Ugh, how does syrup do this? No, _don't_ give me an answer, it was rhetorical and despairing and I don't really want to know."

"I believe I should have used hot water," Saito said.

"Yeah, there's some part of 'I don't want to know' that —" An evil, wonderful supposition came to Dom, and he started to grin. "You've never washed dishes before, have you?"

"Possibly not," Saito said.

"Because you've never actually _had_ to, hah, this is awesome. And pretty fucking funny. And brings me right back to why are you _here_ , rinsing off dishes incredibly badly, when you have, like, an entire new company to be buying up or tearing down or whatever?"

The silence was a bit disconcerting, and Dom turned his head to see that Saito actually seemed to be having to think about the answer, which was — well, worrying, considering the man usually had an answer for everything before you'd so much as finished the question.

"I am not entirely sure," Saito said eventually, and Dom was catapulted back to his early days in the house for a completely different reason, as though he were once again watching Arthur work out why he was staying when he felt it was pointless, that nothing would help. 

"Okay," Dom said easily, because that much he had learned, first from Arthur and then from Eames, that people sometimes wanted to give more and couldn't, had no idea how to start and needed someone else to make the approach.

_Mal, we got another one. I wish you could see._

"Okay," Saito said, more hesitantly.

Dom turned back to the dishes, and watched, from the corner of his eye, Saito observing how he did it. He had no doubt that by the next mealtime, there would somehow be a more efficient way to get everything rinsed and packed in the dishwasher.

He was kind of looking forward to it.

**

**Eames, then**

Americans were different, horribly, similarly (oh, divided by a common language, how terribly true), incomprehensibly different, Eames thought often. 

Or perhaps it was just this group of Americans that was different. 

More experimental (Dom), more thrillingly fascinated (Mal), more steadfastly ruthless (Arthur) and at the same time more childlike than those who worked in and with the dreamscape back home. Watching them was akin to watching teenagers have sex for the first time (granted Arthur, at least, wasn't that far from his teenage years, but still) — it was a bit clumsy and a bit awkward, and at times almost painful, but you came out satisfied in the end.

But Dom and Mal were in no way childlike in their aims, despite their ebullience. 

Mal used their bodies as nothing more than sets of colliding atoms, fascinated by the way the dreamshare played with her new concoctions. Dom, untrammelled now by what any man might think of his attempts, went deeper and deeper into their psyches, pulling out inventions once designed by the hind brain to protect, and making weaponry from those same fears.

It was very trying, at times tiring, but always interesting, as they began to learn about each other, to recognize who was the dreamer from the setting of the dream. 

Arthur seemed to have a love of opulence, combined with sleek lines and no clutter. Functional and beautiful and verging on extravagance, but with no comfort to his created landscapes anywhere.

Mal's dreams were the exact opposite — a little hazy, a little indefinite, and always warm, soft, an embrace of the mind, rather like falling into a world that was a perpetual vacation. 

Only Dom's dreams were unpredictable, his style changing as if he either couldn't make up his mind or was trying to keep them on their toes.

And so far Eames had not volunteered to dream for them, still uncertain of the trust level in either direction.

He forged what they asked for, forged Arthur's generals, incongruous in their stark demands within the rich housing of his expensive hotels; forged Mal's exquisites, men and women both as she set the lilting scene; changed his appearance faster than Dom's scenarios, as he wrapped the clock around itself.

He never built until Mal asked him.

Had she demanded, had she made it a condition, he would have refused and walked away, but Mal was cleverer than that.

Mal came to him in the middle of the night, yawning and half-asleep, and asked him for a dreamworld, a fantasy-life.

"You want what, sweetheart?" Eames looked up from where he had been lounging on the couch watching an old movie that was almost more commercials than plot.

"A fantasy," Mal repeated. "Something for relaxation. Some place happy to carry with me into my real dreams."

"Can't sleep?" he asked. Mal's latest Somnacin mix had been a bit of a bomb.

"I think that may be the wrong word," Mal said dismally, and flopped down beside him on the couch, stealing his freshly-opened beer and taking a long drink from the bottle. "Oh, it is sometimes so nice to be underclass."

"Is it really, thank you very much, dearest Mallorie."

Mal laughed. "You know just what I mean. Tonight I want a club, Eames. Take me dancing."

So he created, just for her, his film-based image of a thirties Berlin club, created for her a smoke haze and the sound of Gershwin and slow, silken movement with a partner who was nothing like her lovely golden boy Dom, or even his direct opposite Arthur. He gave her the time and the place and the fear she craved, and he gave her a beautiful lover who would one day be taken away and killed, gave her someone that she could love and desire to protect and never save. He gave her, not a man, but a woman to adore, a woman who smoked with her right hand and killed with her left.

He gave her violence and bruises and tears and failure, he gave her a woman of pain to love and admire and emulate and relinquish to death.

He gave her all that she longed to be, gave her the perfect gift for a lover of drugged time.

And Mal woke up gasping with desire and went back to Dom.

Eames crept away to sleep on the beach. He had fallen just a little bit in love with Mal that night, he knew, had found himself becoming part of something larger, and the thoughts of belonging to Mal, to Dom, and to Arthur were so overwhelming that he could not bear to be so close.

But he went back, in the morning, and let Dom fall asleep on him and let Mal take over making the coffee and let Arthur laugh at everything that was becoming a falsehood.

Because Mal was travelling far beyond them all.

He hoped that someone else realized it, that Dom realized it, that anyone, anyone who wasn't him realised it, because Mal was a fantastic soul that needed all of them to keep herself properly grounded, needed his fantasias and Arthur's meticulous plans and oh God, Dom's love, more than anything, Dom's love — and if they failed her, then all their hearts would be broken.

**

"Make me a dream, Eames."

"Darling Mal, it's three in the morning."

"Please? I'm so tired. I feel so sick."

And Eames felt his eyes drop to the small swell of her belly, and —

"Mal."

"Please."

He built her worlds.

He gave her the Belle Epoque and Berlin clubs, Paris at the fin-de-siecle, Italy when it was still divided, London before the Great Fire, Egypt when they were building the Pyramids, Rome in its old pomp and glory.

He gave her Demosthenes and his pebbles, gave her Alexander in India, weeping for having reached the end of the world.

He let her console Alexander, argue against Demosthenes, walk through the streets of Troy.

He let her play Helen, and stood watching, a faceless guard that no projection would care about, while she let her spun-gold, unreal hair fall about her, still Mal beneath it all, their lovely dark Mal, and danced with sandalled feet among the priestesses.

_That the topless towers be burnt_  
And men recall that face,  
Move most gently if move you must  
In this lonely place.  
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,  
That nobody looks; her feet  
Practise a tinker shuffle  
Picked up on a street. 

They never talked about their Troy's Hector, unsmiling beneath his dark hair, his fabled helmet always caught beneath his arm. Hector, who should never have appeared in the scenario Mal had chosen here, their security. Hector who came to them in Arthur's guise, watchful and silent, narrow-shouldered and too lean beneath his heavy gold-chased armour.

Eames's projection, Eames's unintentional and self-installed security, the one thing that even Dom and all his expertise had never been quite able to eradicate from the depths of his mind.

There were some things that even dreamers never mentioned to one another.

Night after white insomniac night, Eames gave Mal things that had never existed, plunged into the depths of his memories of Kipling's tales for a leafy world filled with ruins and elephants and tigers, gave her mist-wrapped layered gardens and gave her, in place of the dancing, the war that raged for ten years over a beautiful woman, outside an impossible wall. 

He gave her the rage of gods and the peace of dragons.

Stories and legends, picture-books from his childhood schooling.

"Eames, do you see? We could use this, we could put something into a mind, not take it away, do you see?"

"Try it," he dared her.

"I will. Shall I do it for you? " Her eyes twinkled up at him. "Shall I change the world for you, mon ami, mon petit affecteux?"

"Never for me, Mal," Eames shook his head. "I bend things enough on my own to allow them to be bent for me."

And Mal, Mal who was carrying within her the beginnings of the child who would one day be Philippa, took his face in her hands and whispered —

"Trust me, my darling."

And he did.

And she gave him Arthur. 

And he ran.

**

**Dom, now**

Dom put a movie on for the kids — The Three Musketeers — the 1978 version, because the others were 'crap', (and thankyouverymuchMiles for that) — and pulled clean bedding out of the cupboard to make their beds. Saito lounged in the doorway, apparently relaxed, but Dom could feel his eyes watching every move he made. 

Yeah, making beds was probably another life skill that Saito had probably never had to contend with. If Dom felt evil later and Saito was still around, he might get the man to help him put the kids to bed. That would be one experience he'd never forget.

On the other hand, Dom thought he might spare Saito the miracles of laundry on this particular occasion — he still wasn't entirely sure handwashing wasn't going to be needed, and he felt dirty dishes and mysteriously superglue-like syrup were more than enough education in the fine art of not being completely revolted by things that were once ordinary household objects for one day.

The torments of hell via small children, however, he could and would bestow with glee.

He had only just managed to get a clean undersheet, which had suddenly taken on all the properties of Elastigirl (and oh, how Dom wished his mind didn't automatically make that reference) onto Philippa's bed when the phone rang.

"Phone!" James sang out.

No-one, of course, made any move to pick up.

It rang again and again there was the call, "Phone, dad!"

"Pip, could you get that please?"

"Dad, the movie..." she protested as the phone rang for a third time.

"Philippa!"

He heard the loud sigh that meant his daughter was feeling much put upon, and then the bellowed announcement, "Dad, it's Uncle Eames!"

Dom gave up, dumped the rest of the bedclothes on the end of James's bed, and went to get the phone himself.

"Hi, Eames," he said a bit flatly. "I'm kind of in the middle of something —"

"And I'm kind of deaf," Eames said, sounding as though he were underwater, before his voice cleared, and Dom realised he had been talking away from the phone, probably trying to shake the noise out of his head. "Pip inherited Mal's lungs, then, did she?"

" _Yes_ ," Dom said miserably. He hoped Eames's ears were ringing _loudly_.

"Lovely," Eames said, actually sounding sympathetic. Then again, he'd been on the receiving end of Mal's tirades as much as anyone. "So, we went to the coffee thing, the — _yes thank you Arthur I fucking know it's a cafe shut up_ — and Arthur, you'll be thrilled to hear, sampled all the different blends, and so I'm calling you to regretfully inform you that while this has all been perfectly lovely, I am going to have to kill him."

"What happened?" Dom was puzzled.

"He sampled All. The. Blends." Eames repeated slowly. "They have at least thirty."

"Thirty-four." Dom could hear Arthur through the phone and then a blast of music.

"No... _no_ , Arthur, no-one wants to hear bloody Britney Spears played that loudly... or at all, really." Eames sighed. "He's probably going to be awake for a week and bouncing off the walls for at least the next ten to twelve hours. And I get to be here for _all of it,_ Dominic, are you listening to me?"

There were some thumps and Arthur calling, "Dance with me, Eames. This is a great song!"

"Yes, Arthur," Eames's voice continued blandly, "you have the moves like Jagger... now shut the fuck up."

"They make them with syrups," Arthur rambled on, and Dom heard a dull bang that spoke of head-plus-phone meeting wood. He tried not to laugh.

"Yes, yes they do," Eames mumbled.

"So really, more like thirty seven. And they gave me a free flask of it!"

"Oh, fucking hell, God, no, no, what —"

"Kill him," Dom said quickly. "It's fine."

Eames's familiar mad cackle made _Dom_ want to shake the ringing out of his ears, but it was better than the clattering hollowness of the phone banging on the table, so he figured he'd take what he could get.

"Other than asking for prior consent for justifiable homicide," he said quickly, to the background of clashing hard plastic that suggested Arthur had found the CD collection, and was discarding most of it onto the floor as unsuitable (Dom wasn't looking forward to finding out, even from thousands of miles away, what Arthur currently _would_ consider suitable, but he suspected he wasn't going to have much choice in the matter) "what did you want?"

"Just checking to see if you know when you're arriving," Eames said. 

"Oh, God Eames!" Arthur's voice was closer, and running at about eighty miles per hour. "I just figured out the best way to burn some of this off."

"Probably by the end of the week," Dom answered. "I have to get the house closed up and arrange for Miles and Marie to keep James and Pip."

"Arthur... I'm on the phone... no, you can't just..." Eames's voice suddenly went down an octave. "Or maybe you can... yeah... that's... um... uhhhhhh... er... yeah... a week... right? Arthur... you... fuck..."

"Yes a week ohGodnostopbye," Dom said, and hung up in a hurry. "Arthur, you fuck," he repeated with an entirely different emphasis, and then realised he was talking to his ceiling, where the shotgun blast's damage had long since been repaired.

"What are you laughing at?" Saito asked curiously, emerging into the hallway.

Dom shook his head. "Plus ça change," he said, and didn't know who he was talking to, or even if it mattered any more, because Mal was there, she was always there, and she wasn't trapped in a dreamworld that had long since killed her, she was with him, she lived in him, and they had been the same person for so long that it wasn't surprising he'd forgotten that part.

"Plus c'est la même chose?" Saito asked in bewilderment. "What is the same, Dominic?"

"Everything," Dom said, and smiled. "Nothing."

"I... see," Saito said, in tones that suggested anything but.

Dom just smiled at him. "Still staying for coffee?" he asked lightly, and was amused and pleased when Saito gave him a rather surprised attempt at a smile in return.

"If you're still offering," he said solemnly, "then yes. I think I should like that very much."

"Good," Dom said, and went back in to fight the good fight.

With the bedclothes.

FIN


End file.
